The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
OCZ Sends Me SSDs, Once More
As I mentioned before, after the X25-M article I was somewhat blacklisted from getting more SSDs to test. Since the Core V2, I hadn’t tested a single SSD from OCZ or anyone else for that matter. Everything on the market was either based on Samsung’s SLC drive, JMicron MLC or the Intel X25 series.
Needless to say, I was excited when I got a box from OCZ.
I got the drives early in the morning. Excited, I opened them up. Inside the box were three drives. The OCZ Apex (I’d never reviewed it, and OCZ reluctantly sent another JMicron drive to me), the Vertex and the Summit.
The Summit was based on Samsung’s latest MLC SSD controller, which I’d heard great things about. It’s supposed to compete with Intel’s drive.
The Vertex is the drive I was most interested in. A value SSD that didn’t suck, or at least that’s what it seemed to be on paper. Ryan even left me a little note on the box:
O RLY?
It’s worth noting that although other SSD makers will be making drives based on the Indilinx and Samsung controllers, OCZ was the first to get me drives based on both of these controllers. In fact, I was done testing the OCZ Summit based on Samsung’s latest controller before Samsung ever offered to ship me the drive.
I pushed the Apex and Summit drives aside for now. What I wanted to know was how the Vertex performed.
I cloned my system drive and used the Vertex in my personal machine. As soon as I hit the desktop I knew there was a problem; all of my icons took longer than they should’ve to load. It took about 30 minutes of actual usage for the drive to stutter and within a couple of hours performance got so unbearable that I had to pull it out.
Sigh, the Vertex was broken.
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Erickffd - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Also created an account just to post this comment.Really impressive and well done article ! Will stay tune for further developments and reviews. Thank you so much :)
Also... very impressed by OCZ's respond and commitment upon end users needs and product quality assurance (unfortunately not so commun by large this days among other companies). Certanly will buy from them my next SSDs to reward and support their healty policy.
Be well ! ;)
Gasaraki88 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This truly was a GREAT article. I enjoyed reading it and was very informative. Thank you so much. That's why Anandtech is the best site out there.davidlants - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This is one of the best tech articles I have ever read, I created an account just to post this comment. I've been a fan of Anandtech for years and articles like this (and the RV700 article from a while back) show the truly unique perspective and access that Anand has that simply no other tech site can match. GREAT WORK!!!Zak - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
I just got the Apex. I'd probably cough up more dough for the Vertex after reading this. However, I've run it for two days as my system disk in MacPro and haven't noticed any issues, it's really fast. But I guess I'll get Vertex for my Windows 7 build.Z.
Nemokrad - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
What I find intriguing about this article is that these smaller manufacturers do not do real world internal testing for these things. They should not need 3rd parties like you to figure this shit out for them. Maybe now OCZ will learn what they need to do for the future.JonasR - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Thanks for an excellent article. I have one question does anyone know which controller is beeing used in the new Patriot 256GB V.3 SSD?
tgwgordon - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Anyone know if the Vertex Anand used had 32M or 64M cache?Dennis Travis - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Excellent and informative article as always Anand. Thanks so much for posting the truth!!IsLNdbOi - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Can't remember what page it was, but you showed some charts on the performance of SSDs at their lowest possible performance levels.At their lowest possible performance levels are they still faster than the 300GB Raptor?
Edgemeal - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
It's too bad Windows and applications don't let you select where all the data that needs to be updated and saved to is stored. If that was an option a SSD could be used to only load data (EXE files and support files) and a HDD could be used to store files that are updated frequently, like a web browser for example, their constantly caching files, from the sound of this article that would kill the performance of a SSD in no time.Great article, I'll stick to HDDs for now.