OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Solid-state drives have always held a bit of a fascination with me, at least ever since 2008 when Intel brought them to the attention of the consumer market. SSDs have progressed a long ways in the three years since, a feat I find particularly underscored by the SSD in today's review. The simple fact is, there isn't another part of the computer industry where leaps of 50% let alone 100% or more are still occurring with every successive generation of hardware. The change from the SandForce-based SF-1200 to the SF-2281 controller that powers the OCZ Vertex 3 solid-state drive is one of those leaps. Granted, the new SATA 6Gb/s interface featured on the Vertex 3 has a significant role in the new levels of performance, but it is only due to the SandForce controller that the Vertex 3 is able to set new levels of performance previously only seen from dual and even quad-controllers in RAID 0 before now. It should therefore go without saying that consumers wishing to get the full performance out of a Vertex 3 or Agility 3 SSD will need a system or laptop with an available SATA 6Gb/s port. The Vertex is OCZ's premier model of solid-state drive. Like the Agility 3, the Vertex 3 is powered by a SF-2281 controller and features a SATA 6Gb/s interface, but after that things begin to differ slightly. The Vertex 3 makes use of Intel's 25nm MLC NAND and uses a custom PCB of OCZ's own design. The Vertex 3 series is offered in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB, all of which feature slightly over 12% of the given capacity as spare area. This "over-provisioning" of the SSD allows it to better maintain performance when full and provides a scratch area to replace any NAND sectors as they wear out, but is why the capacity seen within the OS is lower than what is listed on the box. Curiously the Vertex 3 datasheet shows an un-mentioned 60GB model, so it is possible a more affordable 60GB model Vertex 3 may show up within the near future. OCZ Vertex 3 (6Gbps) Listed Capacity 120GB 240GB 480GB Formatted Capacity ~111GB ~223GB ~447GB Max Read Up to 550MB/s Up to 550MB/s Up to 530MB/s Max Write Up to 500MB/s Up to 520MB/s Up to 450MB/s 4KB Random Read 20K IOPS 40K IOPS 50K IOPS 4KB Random Write 60K IOPS 60K IOPS 40K IOPS MSRP $249.99 $499.99 $1,799.99 Warranty 3 Years As with past OCZ drives the Vertex 3 comes in a small package which includes the mounting screws and a solid metal 3.5" bay adapter, which serves double-duty as a layer of armor plating during shipment. The plastic top drive housing leaves a little something to be desired, but that's purely a cosmetic quibble. For those curious, it is worth mentioning that OCZ also offers Agility 3 and Solid 3 solid-state drives. The Agility 3 uses less expensive NAND and will offer a few percentage points lower performance because of it, but otherwise remains identical to the Vertex series. The Solid 3 is the value offering, and although it still uses a SF-2281 controller it appears to halve the NAND chips on the PCB, which would explain why its listed performance drops so much. In any event the Solid 3 doesn't appear to be available yet, but we would easily recommend the Agility 3 as the price/performance sweet spot to the Vertex 3. [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. Component Techgage Solid-State Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-2600 - 3.50GHz (Locked) Quad-Core Motherboard ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Memory 4GB Kingston DDR3-1866 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5770 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB Hard Drive Kingston V+ Series 128GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Power Supply Antec NeoHE 550W Cooling Noctua DH-14 Et cetera Lite-on DVD-RW Windows 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 as it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer's performance and presents it in a neat simple final result. Thankfully it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, etc) in addition to given individual test results. With the latest 2011 release of PCMark 7 we should hopefully see quite a few changes to how SSDs are handled, and the resulting scores computed, as previously, results were biased towards sequential read and write performance. With its Windows 7 focus PCMark 7 offers a variety of storage system tests, such as simulating a Windows Defender scan and using Windows Media Center to using other built-in programs for video and music file manipulation. But for those that just want a nice overarching score, it has those too. Interestingly, it appears the new PCMark 7 suite does change how SSD scores are computed, as its predecessor Vantage produced some notoriously unexplainable results for us in the past. Pure sequential writes no longer are given as much precedence which is as it should be. OCZ Vertex 3 does not disappoint and perches neatly atop of the charts - every single one of them. It's a promising, although not unexpected showing for the SF-2281 powered Vertex 3! [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: Iometer & AS SSD] 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 hit a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Also, the program delivers results in IOPS (input/output operations per second), a common metric used in enterprise and server environments. The level of customization cannot be understated. Aside from choosing the obvious figures, like chunk sizes, you can choose the percentage of the time that each respective chunk size will be used in a given test. You can also alter the percentages for read and write, and also how often either the reads or writes will be random (as opposed to sequential). I'm just touching the surface here, but what's most important is that we're able to deliver a consistent test on all of our drives, which increases the accuracy in our results. Because of the level of control Iometer offers, we've created profiles for three of the most popular workloads out there: Database, File Server and Workstation. Database uses chunk sizes of 8KB, with 67% read, along with 100% random coverage. File Server is the more robust of the group, as it features chunk sizes ranging from 512B to 64KB, in varying levels of access, but again with 100% random coverage. Lastly, Workstation focuses on 8KB chunks with 80% read and 80% random coverage. Because these profiles aren't easily found on the Web, with the same being said about the exact structure of each, we're hosting the software here for those who want to benchmark their own drives with the exact same profiles we use. That ZIP archive (~3.5MB) includes the application and the three profiles...

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review

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