OCZ Summit 120GB SSD Review

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


The Summit “Large file” and “Copy to Self” test results ARE really impressive. We have to wonder if the small file copy to and from results are more due to old firmware getting in the way rather than anything else. That being said, these are damn impressive numbers though no matter which way you cut it.

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

Simply put, the Summit is a joy to use. I honestly don’t think anyone under normal circumstances will notice slow down or stutters from these drives. Sure, you CAN make any drive stutter, after all it still is only a single drive and not an array of them backed up by HUGE amounts of cache on the raid controller; but the beefy 128MB of onboard ram does come in handy.