OCZ Vector 256GB SSD Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] It was nearing the end of 2008; Intel had just released its widely-successful X25-M SSDs into the market. At the time, these SSD delivered the best performance, the best reliability, and the best sustained performance without any of the prominent shortcomings of the JMicron controller-based SSDs that followed rapidly on its heels. Even six months later, no drives were anything close to competitive with the X25-M. That is, until the OCZ Vertex came along. The Vertex was the first competitive consumer SSD to compete on similar performance at a lower price point, and inside was the controller from a relatively unknown South Korean startup called Indilinx. Initially, performance still left something to be desired, but after months of firmware updates the resulting Barefoot controller was not only stable, but saw significant performance increases in random IOPS. That made it a real competitor to the then-$595 80GB Intel SSD. That’s the story behind the Barefoot 3 controller and its name. The Barefoot 2 only saw limited use in the OCZ Vertex Plus SSD, as by that point in time another relatively unknown startup called SandForce blew into the scene and upended the SSD market in a big way. While many enthusiasts assumed Indilinx was down and out, unable to contend with the rapidly scaling performance of each successive generation of major SSD controller launches, OCZ Technology (at the time, primarily a memory DRAM company) knew otherwise and made the bold decision to outright buy the company. The Barefoot 3 is the first true culmination of that buyout, as while OCZ drives like the Octane and Vertex 4 both used Indilinx firmware, they still utilized Marvell silicon for the controller. As the break from the Vertex name hints, the Vector is the first top-to-bottom Indilinx SSD since the original Vertex. The Vector makes a clean break in more ways than with just the name. The drive itself is only 7mm tall, as opposed to the typical 9mm of other SSDs. Past OCZ drives sometimes featured badly-fitted molded plastic lids, but the Vector surprisingly, even refreshingly uses a heavy all-aluminum housing that exudes durability. There’s a MacBook Pro analogy in there somewhere. Also, instead of the basic disk transfer tool, the Vector comes bundled with a key to activate Acronis True Image for disk-cloning use. Beyond the Barefoot 3 itself, the drive utilizes 25nm MLC NAND from IMFT in the typical 8-channel arrangement, with the 256GB model packing a pair of 256MB low-power DDR3 chips for cache. Also something newly-introduced with the Vector is defined warranty expectations. The Vector comes with a 5-year warranty or a guarantee of 36.5TB of disk writes - whichever comes first. Some SandForce drives in particular from OCZ would begin to throttle disk write speed in order to preserve the NAND lifespan in the event of extremely abusive wear, but this time OCZ is letting consumers use the Vector however they wish. The company simply states that the drive is guaranteed for 36.5TB and anything beyond this point will annul the warranty. 36.5TB works out to be 20GB worth of writes per day, every day, for five years. Except for fringe cases, enterprise use, or simple abuse, 20GB of writes per day is considerably more than what a heavy computer enthusiast would use on average over any given week. We have to give OCZ some kudos here for being upfront with these details and applaud them for doing so. OCZ Vector Solid-State Drive 128 GB 256 GB 512 GB Sequential Read 550 MB/s Sequential Write 400 MB/s 530 MB/s 4K Random Read (QD32) 90,000 IOPS 100,000 IOPS 4K Random Write (QD32) 95,000 IOPS NAND 25nm Intel MLC Flash Interface SATA 3.0 6Gbit/s Power Consumption Idle: 0.9W Active: 2.25W Warranty 5 Years or 36.5 TB Package Contents Single-piece metal 3.5” tray adapterAcronis True Image Cloning software keyI <3 my SSD stickerMounting screwsWarranty & Acronis documentation We won’t rehash the performance specs given in the table, but suffice to say, on paper these are some of the highest IOPS ratings we have seen yet for any SSD. Even so, OCZ has made a point to emphasize that it didn’t just strive for performance with the Vector, but set out to deliver good sustained performance. All SSDs will lose their factory-new performance as they are used; this is normal. On modern SSDs this performance drop is not tangible and it will reach a point of equilibrium once it the NAND reaches saturation (meaning all the NAND was written to at least once, not that the SSD itself is full). On the next page, you can review our testing methodologies along with our test system. Immediately after, we'll get started with our performance results. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Techgage Solid-State Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-2600 – 3.80GHz (Locked) Quad-Core Motherboard ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Memory 4GB Kingston DDR3-2133 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5770 Storage Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB Hard DriveCrucial m4 256GBKingston HyperX 3K 240GBOCZ Vector 256GBOCZ Vertex 4 256GB Power Supply Antec NeoHE 550W Cooling Noctua DH-14 Et cetera Dell 2407WFP (1920x1200)Lite-on DVD-RWWindows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for benchmarking we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines The Core i7-2600 processor is turbo-locked at 3.5GHz for result consistency. No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's EFI. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's EFI for best performance. Only the Intel 6Gb/s port controller is used for test drives. Only cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. For our new Sandy Bridge storage testbed we have migrated to using test images for our drives. All drives are imaged with the cloned test image to ensure all drivers, programs, and settings remain identical for testing purposes. We feel disk cloning software and SSD controller technology has matured to the point where potential issues such as non-aligned sectors are no longer a potential issue. For testing, we run all tests five times dropping the highest and lowest results, then take the average of the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results are seen the test will be run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems and the software that runs on them, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. Finally, we are seeking to constantly improve and expand upon our SSD testing methodology. We are always actively seeking real-world workload scenarios that are bottlenecked by hard drives, so if you have any suggestions whatsoever or there is a program you would like to see included in our SSD content, then please drop by our forums and let us know! We are always looking to expand our SSD benchmarks and provide more useful and real-world results, and not just synthetic numbers. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark 7] Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction; it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. It includes over 25 individual workloads designed to measure all aspects of system performance and gives individual scores in each test as well as an overall system performance score for easy system comparisons. PCMark 7 offers a more accurate measure of performance as compared to its predecessor, PCMark Vantage. The storage scoring metrics especially were significantly re-tuned and optimized with SSDs in mind to give a more balanced disk subsystem score. Overall, the Vector is victorious in these benchmarks, edging out the overall system score as well as taking the top spot in the storage subsystem score. The Vector took top spot in every individual test, save the video editing and game loading systems, which tend to favor SandForce-based drives. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: Iometer] Originally developed by Intel - and since given to the open-source community - Iometer (pronounced “eyeawmeter”, like thermometer) is one of the best storage-testing applications available, for a couple of reasons. The first, and primary, is that it’s completely customizable, and if you have a specific workload you need to test a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Secondly, it bypasses the Windows disk subsystem entirely, meaning it bypasses the OS drivers and writes directly to the storage media. This has important implications, such as it means Windows 7 cannot correctly align Iometer to match the SSD or HDD sector alignment. We have updated our test suite to the latest stable 1.10 rc1 build of Iometer, which was released in December, 2010. This version makes some changes to be aware of; specifically, it gives the option for three types of data sets used during testing...

OCZ Vector 256GB SSD Review

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