FRONTPAGE OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD Review

[Overclockers.com]

OCZ has given us the opportunity to look at their new Solid State Drive (SSD), the Vertex 3. This drive is supposed to be 'Breaking through performance, cost, and maintenance barriers, OCZ enterprise and consumer SATA solid state drives have taken the storage landscape by storm.' Let's see if OCZ made good on their promise.

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[MattNo5ss]

These SATAIII SSDs are beasts

What XP Startup time do you get in PCMark05 with one of these? Probably exceeding 220MB/s...

 

[Mr Alpha]

Nice review. It is really curious how the Vertex 2 beats the Vertex 3 in 0Fill 4k write CMD tests. I wonder if it is because of some change the order it does encryption and deduplication.

P.S. This review showed up on top under SSDs in Sparks in Google+

 

[EarthDog]

Nice... Im sure OCF and OCZ love that exposure.

Not sure on those CDM results, but they were highly repeatable, SE, after SE, after SE, after SE. Peculiar. All other results appear spot on though..

As far as PC05 times. I havent tried it. Its got to be an absolute bear, like was the Revo x2 to try to get it under 220MB startup.

 

[bcsizemo]

-I'm going to state up front that I'm not a fan of OCZ, so take this with a grain of salt.

"A lot of what makes Sandforce drives perform so well comes from data compression. For example, if I write a large, originally uncompressed file to the drive, it’s easy for the controller to compress this type of data. On the flip side, a ZIP file is already compressed, and consequently cannot be easily made smaller and therefore takes longer to write to the drive. Your computer still thinks that a xx MB .doc file is being written as xx MB, but once that data hits the controller, it ideally ends up as half that value. This compression helps lower write amplification and extend the life of the drive by using fewer program-erase cycles."

Okay all that right there pretty much puts this squarely into an OS drive position. I have a couple of drives in my system, and on my non-OS drives there lives a high amount of non-compressable material, rar's, video, pics, audio.

So two questions:
1. Am I really getting the space advertised on the drive? IE, is a 120G drive really close to 120G (I know there will be data loss to overhead, formatting, backup sectors ect..). So an 80+ gig rar file could fit on it right?
2. Is this the direction all SSD's are going to take? The only market I really see for the 120+ gig drives is in laptops. Most can only handle a single drive, so if you need speed and storage then bigger is needed. In a desktop machine an SSD and mechanical drive work fine as a team. (Obviously when speed is important such as video/photo editing or if you are an avid gamer, SSD's are better.) As an OS drive it's great, but I see this compression thing as a real limiting issue depending on how it is marketed.

 

[EarthDog]

1. I have 223GB of 240 available. I dont understand why you are under the impression that such a significant chunk of the drive would be unavailable for use. Some drives have more set aside for overprovisioning, but its marketed as around what you get, so you do not buy a 120GB drive and have 80GB available.
2. I really do not know. You can see though from the benchmarks outside of ATTO, that in-compressible data is still written/read much faster than a mechanical drive.

The biggest issue with SSD's, to me, are the price / GB.

 

[bcsizemo]

The biggest issue with SSD's, to me, are the price / GB.

I agree with that above anything else.

1. I have 223GB of 240 available. I dont understand why you are under the impression that such a significant chunk of the drive would be unavailable for use. Some drives have more set aside for overprovisioning, but its marketed as around what you get, so you do not buy a 120GB drive and have 80GB available.

Well it's the use aspect/data type vs. real world size. Obviously on a non-compressing drive like standard rust stuff data size is data size. But say if you used one of these drives to store a fairly compressible database. Does that mean you could store more data than the actual size of the database.

-Note I'm not arguing about the formatted empty drive size vs. what the package says. I know that varies some by manufactures, I'm only talking about the data being written to the drive and how the drive handles that in terms of compression vs. free space vs. real physical bytes free. So take the 120 gig drives formatted at 100 gigs free space as an example, not a real world thing.-

120 gig drive formatted to 100 gigs, 20 gigs of text documents, but now with 85 gigs still free or 80 gigs free?

Or say you did video work:

same 100 gig formatted drive, 20 gig movie, now 80 gigs free or 75 gigs free?


It reminds me of something like Drivespace from eons ago. I had a friend with 120 meg Conner drive that actually had more physical data than could fit on the disk. Obviously when you are dealing with software it's a whole lot trickier than dealing with a piece of hardware that is handling it all for you.

I am giving OCZ and everyone else that will use these Sandforce controllers the benefit of the doubt here and when it says 120 gigs you get close to that in real uncompressed bytes. I'm just pointing out, if SSD's continue to scale then marketing needs to understand that even if you could fit 3 terabytes on a 2 terabyte drive then it still must be marketed as a 2 terabyte drive. Or market them like LTO tapes and say 120 gigs uncompressed / 160 gigs compressed.

 

[Mr Alpha]

The compression on these SandForce drives is completely invisible to the user and does not in any way, shape or form impact how much data you can store on it. A 10GB file will appear to take 10GB regardless of how much it can be compressed. Once you appear to be out of space the drive won't let you save any more to it, regardless of how much space is actually used on the flash.

 

[mgsickler]

I am looking into getting this SSD, but man, I just cant throw down that kind of money for it yet. I am currently using a SATA II SSD, but I would really love to see the kind of speeds that SATA III can throw out.

And after reading the review, it seems that this sucker is well worth the cash. I guess its time to start saving up.