OCZ 30GB Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTX30G)

Jun 9th, 2009 | By Simon

IOMeter

IOMeter is the latest addition to my hard drive benchmarking suite. The software is highly customizable and what I’m doing only scratches the surface of its capability. I added IOMeter because of flaws in the original solid state drives on the market. After completing all the benchmarks on my first JMicron SSD, I popped into my laptop and made it my day-to-day drive. I found overtime the performance to become really sluggish. At first, MSN messages would take longer to appear and videos would stutter. After some digging on the net, it turned out to be a problem with the random write performance. More information on the issue at hand can be found at AnandTech.

With IOMeter, I set the program up to pepper the drive with a 1GB file with 4KB record sizes, 100% random (as opposed to 100% sequential), 50% read and 50% write for 3 minutes. I generated results for average read and write access times and average read and write transfer rates.

It’s clear that with an average write response time of 6.114 seconds on the JMicron controller compared to 0.062ms from the OCZ Vertex the system will stutter. Even the read and write performances are factors higher with the OCZ Vertex.

Boot Time

With SSD comes the reduction of start-up times. Basically every application will load up a tiny bit quicker. The performance is very much related to how fast the drive is able to read random files scattered throughout your drive required for load up and how many operations it can handle at once. The higher these two throughputs, the faster programs will load. With the OCZ Vertex, we’ve got a good lead over the original JMicron controller and the G.Skill Falcon.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

7 comments
Leave a comment »

Sean June 9th, 2009 4:57 pm
My hdd died a few weeks ago… I have some spare traditional drives I could have replaced it with but wanted something new to play with and wanted to ease the bottleneck that normal drives create. I got 2 of these 30gb drives for the price of one, do to a deal I worked out with a customer, and in raid0 they KILL traditional drives. KILL.

Reply | Quote
Frank Rizzo June 9th, 2009 7:31 pm
The Intel X25-M is still king of the hill because of its read speed with 4kb files. The X25-M scores 112,164 on my system with 4KB read (ATTO) vs. the Vertex 50,000. I have personally used 5 different types (SLC, MLC JMICRON 1, MLC JMICRON 2, Vertex, Intel) of SSD and nothing compares to the X25-M.

Reply | Quote
Simon June 9th, 2009 11:13 pm
Sean wrote:

My hdd died a few weeks ago… I have some spare traditional drives I could have replaced it with but wanted something new to play with and wanted to ease the bottleneck that normal drives create. I got 2 of these 30gb drives for the price of one, do to a deal I worked out with a customer, and in raid0 they KILL traditional drives. KILL.

We’re doing a review for HighPoint card and the results are smoking indeed. We’ll have the results up soon and they are definitely good

Reply | Quote
Simon June 9th, 2009 11:15 pm
Frank Rizzo wrote:

The Intel X25-M is still king of the hill because of its read speed with 4kb files. The X25-M scores 112,164 on my system with 4KB read (ATTO) vs. the Vertex 50,000. I have personally used 5 different types (SLC, MLC JMICRON 1, MLC JMICRON 2, Vertex, Intel) of SSD and nothing compares to the X25-M.

Yes, the Intel X25-M is still the king of the hill but not everyone can afford one and that needs to be taken into considerations. You’re looking at twice the price for an Intel SSD vs the Indilinx MLC.

Reply | Quote
Frank Rizzo June 10th, 2009 5:43 am
Simon wrote:

Yes, the Intel X25-M is still the king of the hill but not everyone can afford one and that needs to be taken into considerations. You’re looking at twice the price for an Intel SSD vs the Indilinx MLC.

The Intel drives are actually less expensive than the Vertex. I just bought another X25-Ms 80GB from Newegg.com for $289.95 (free shipping) yesterday. That is $2.96 per Gigabyte.
The OCZ Vertex 30GB is $4.30 per Gigabyte AFTER you factor in the rebate.
The Vertex drives aren’t bad, but they are OVERPRICED. The 30GB drive should sell for $75 not $149. The 120GB Vertex is not worth a dime more than $180. I would consider a 120GB Vertex for $180, but I’ll take an 80GB Intel ($290) over a 120GB Vertex ($355) any day of the week.

Reply | Quote
Simon June 10th, 2009 11:15 pm
Frank Rizzo wrote:

Simon wrote:

Yes, the Intel X25-M is still the king of the hill but not everyone can afford one and that needs to be taken into considerations. You’re looking at twice the price for an Intel SSD vs the Indilinx MLC.

The Intel drives are actually less expensive than the Vertex. I just bought another X25-Ms 80GB from Newegg.com for $289.95 (free shipping) yesterday. That is $2.96 per Gigabyte.
The OCZ Vertex 30GB is $4.30 per Gigabyte AFTER you factor in the rebate.
The Vertex drives aren’t bad, but they are OVERPRICED. The 30GB drive should sell for $75 not $149. The 120GB Vertex is not worth a dime more than $180. I would consider a 120GB Vertex for $180, but I’ll take an 80GB Intel ($290) over a 120GB Vertex ($355) any day of the week.

If the Vertex 30GB cost $75 and the 120GB cost $180 then it would definitely be a steal and it would sell out in no time. As it stands even if OCZ’s cost per GB is still higher the overall cost for being able to own an SSD, and get good performance, is much lower than buying an Intel drive. Not everyone can afford $300 for an 80GB Intel SSD. The $130AR makes the Vertex a very promising buy and the $150 saved could be put to other upgrades.

Reply | Quote
nabillo August 7th, 2009 2:36 pm
@ Sean:

I have 2 vertexes in raid 0 as well with windows vista, the only thing they killed is each other…
something is obviously wrong with my installation, I used to get random hangs, but now it is even worse, windows crashes with one of the drivers not detected any more on restart… I have to leave my system cool down before it can detect the driver again…
strange…

Reply | Quote