OCZ SSD 32GB Solid State Hard Disk
Test Setup
As we’ve already mentioned back on page #1, we wanted to put the OCZ SSD head-to-head with some of the fastest mechanical hard disks available in a similar price range. This turned out to be the recently released and extemely fast Western Digital Velociraptor and its elder brother the RaptorX – both of which were generously donated to us from Yoyotech.co.uk.
In terms of performance both Western Digital drives are fairly well matched to the OCZ SSD. The Velociraptor shares a similar read speed while the RaptorX shares a similar write speed. Of course, both of these mechanical drives have significant seek times measured in milliseconds, whereas the OCZ SSD’s latency is almost non-existent in comparison and measured in nanoseconds. With everything considered this should certainly make for an interesting set of results over the next few pages
To ensure that no part of our test system would be a bottleneck to the disk drives, an Intel X48/ICH9R based motherboard was used along with a Quad Core Q6600 Intel CPU overclocked to 3.6GHZ. Intel’s latest “Inf” drivers and all Windows updates were also installed to ensure optimum performance and stability. The full system configuration can be seen below:
While synthetic benchmarks such as HD Tune offer a good insight into the performance of a disk drive, these figures do not always translate directly into real world performance. For this reason we selected to perform several day-to-day operations (such as file conversion and Windows startup) in addition to synthetic benchmarks. The full set of tests can be seen below:
Synthetic Benchmarks
HD Tune Pro 3.1.0
File Write & Manipulation
WinAVI Xvid – DVD Convert
Dummy file creation (15GB)
Peazip file compression / decompression.
OS & Gaming
Windows Vista Start-up time.
Unreal Tournament III map load time.
Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way, let’s check out the results…
