OCZ Summit 120GB SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read Performance


It really does appear that our hunch about 16 chips being the sweet spot is correct; after all this is the third result in a row where the newer firmware equipped P64 SHOULD be faster than the Summit. We REALLY wish OCZ had shipped us a Summit with 18C1 firmware, then we would have been cooking with GAS! As it stands, the small 4k reads are still significantly lower than the Indilinx SSDs but 1.4MB/s improvement is nothing to sneeze at!


Write Performance


Wow. These number are much, MUCH better than the P64 and while still lower in the 4k writes they are impressive in the 512 and sequential tests.

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamout of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


As expected, a same generation Sammy Controller performs the same irregardless of the box it is in or the label on that box. With that being said it is nice to know that double the NAND chips doesn’t increase the latency of this device and that the P64’s numbers were not flukes.