OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Update: Retail vs Review Sample

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 and size at 100MB.

When it comes to write speed and Crystal Diskmark, the latest firmware does add a few minor refinements and we see an across the board improvement which varies from minor to significant. The largest improvement is within the 32 que depth 4K results. What was once extremely good has now become even better.

On the read side of things, the new results are not quite as straightforward though. Once again the 32 que depth 4K results are simply astonishing but both the 4K 1 que depth and sequential read speed are ever so slightly lower. We do however consider this small discrepancy to simply be variation from drive to drive and thus inconsequential as neither will be noticeable in real world scenarios.

PCMark Vantage

While there are numerous suites of tests that make up PCMark Vantage, only one is pertinent: the HDD Suite. The HDD Suite consists of 8 tests that try and replicate real world drive usage. Everything from how long a simulated virus scan takes to complete, to MS Vista start up time to game load time is tested in these 8 core tests; however we do not consider this anything other than just another suite of synthetic tests. For this reason, while each test is scored individually we have opted to include only the overall score.

It seems that while Crystal DiskMark did indeed like the new firmware enabled Vertex 3 more than the previous sample, PCMark Vantage down right loves it. A boost this large is both significant and very impressive. It seems that OCZ and SandForce were able to – in a very short period of time - tease even more performance out of this drive.