OCZ Summit 250GB SATA2 SSD
Test Setup
Published: 29th June 2009 | Source: OCZ | Price: £552 |
Test Setup
The test setup we will be using today for evaluation of the OCZ Summit drive is fully optimised for compatability and performance for testing SSD drives:
Processor: Intel Core i7 920 @ Stock Speed
Motherboard: Gigabyte UD4P X58
Memory: 6GB Corsair XMS2 1600Mhz
SATA Controller: On-board ICH10R Southbridge
Chipset Drivers: Intel 9.1.0.1007
Operating System: Windows Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 + most recent Updates
Most people who will be considering the upgarde to an SSD drive will likely be making the jump from one of the many 'favourite' mechanical hard drives. With this in mind we will be assessing the OCZ Summits capabilities in comparison to the following drives with the previous results of the OCZ Vertex thrown in for good measure:
| OCZ Summit | OCZ Vertex | WD Velociraptor | Samsung F1 | WD Caviar Black | |
| Read Seek Time | <0.1ms | <0.1ms | 4.3ms | 8.9ms | 12.2ms |
| Write Seek Time | <0.1ms | <0.1ms | 4.7ms | 8.9ms | 12.2ms |
| Average Latency | <0.1ms | <0.1ms | 5.5ms | 4.17ms | 4.17ms |
| Read Transfer Rate | 220MB/s | 250MB/s | 120MB/s | 175MB/s | 106MB/s |
| Write Transfer Rate | 200MB/s | 180MB/s | 120MB/s | 175MB/s | 106MB/s |
| Capacity | 250GB | 120GB | 300GB | 1TB | 750GB |
| Cache | 128MB | 64GB | 16MB | 32MB | 32MB |
At the time of writing the review there were no publicly available firmware updates available for the OCZ Summit. Various Operating system and BIOS tweaks were however performed to obtain the absolute maximum operating conditions for the OCZ Summit SSD. These tweaks are:
- Superfetch: Off
- Indexing: Off
- Search indexing: Off
- Defrag: Off
- SATA Mode in BIOS was set to IDE for all hard disks
- Drive was formatted with a 4096 cluster size
- Enable Enhanced Performance was selected in device manager for all hard disks
Testing Methodology
While synthetic benchmarks such as HDTune offer a good insight into the performance of a mechanical disk drive, these figures do not always translate directly into real world performance, this is especially so for Solid State drives. I encountered numerous problems with HDTune Pro, especially with regard to the write speeds of the drive which were sporadic at best and demoralising at worst (see screenshot below).
Despite numerous formats and tweaks, write speeds remained inconclusive so after two days worth of troubleshooting, I had to concede defeat and put this down to an incompatibility issue. For this reason I have not included the results of HDTune nor taken them into consideration when scoring the drive in the conclusion.
Before we get on-board with the testing, let's perform a run of HDTach, again not the best utility to use on SSD's but it should give us an idea of the performance to expect:
Not too shabby at all. with a sustained read speed of almost 180MB/s. This reading however is below the advertised speed of 'up to' 220 MB/s which is a little concerning. I'll wait and see what the other benchmarks report before commenting on this further.
Along with many other synthetic benchmarks run today, I adecided to perform several day-to-day operations (such as file transfer and Windows startup) in addition to the synthetic benchmarks. The full set of tests can be seen below
Synthetic Benchmarks
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.34
PCMark Vantage HDD benchmarks
CrystalDiskMark 2.2.0f
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.34
PCMark Vantage HDD benchmarks
CrystalDiskMark 2.2.0f
File Write & Manipulation
Random file creation (15GB)
Sequential file creation (100GB)
Random file creation (15GB)
Sequential file creation (100GB)
OS & Gaming
Windows Vista Startup time.
Windows Vista Shutdown time.
Unreal Tournament III map load time.
Windows Vista Startup time.
Windows Vista Shutdown time.
Unreal Tournament III map load time.
Let's see how the OCZ Summit performed...
Most Recent Comments
Great review mate....shame about the price though... is twice as much as the bloody pc i am usin...
Yeah I hear ya on the price. Still when people are paying £100 for 30GB I guess it's not so bad lol especially when you consider this is no 'run of the mill' drive.
intel or was it samsung are releasing some cheaper SSDs in the next couple of weeks. Wonder what they'll be like.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by name='w3bbo'
Yeah I hear ya on the price. Still when people are paying £100 for 30GB I guess it's not so bad lol especially when you consider this is no 'run of the mill' drive.
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It greatly depends on the amount of cache the drives carry. Cheap drives usually mean less cache and I would be very hesitant before buying a drive with little/no cache as you will get stutter problems.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by name='w3bbo'
It greatly depends on the amount of cache the drives carry. Cheap drives usually mean less cache and I would be very hesitant before buying a drive with little/no cache as you will get stutter problems.
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Yipes!!
That's blisteringly fast. Pant-wettingly expensive, but wow such speed.
/green with envy.
That's blisteringly fast. Pant-wettingly expensive, but wow such speed.
/green with envy.
what are ocz thinking! £500 for abit of pcb and chips, i dont think they know the world is in debt
Quote:
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Originally Posted by name='w3bbo'
It greatly depends on the amount of cache the drives carry. Cheap drives usually mean less cache and I would be very hesitant before buying a drive with little/no cache as you will get stutter problems.
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Pricing is ultimately outrageous, I didn't see anything significant that seperated it from it's vertex partner.
More or less agree with the Mediocre sum-up, u would expect a cheap 3.5 adaptor to be in there as standard.
Packaging wize, I think they're very nervous about making it a good one - criticism then may be that £552, they should charge £499 and keep it very oem.
Good luck to them milking users tbh. They feel the 250g drive is worth more than 2x GTX 285.
Once data is in the RAM the harddrive is hardly touched. At that price there is no need for it. Are they stupid?
I have a suspicion also that they're looking at Ultra320 prices, controllers and drives, and thinking "if they can charge that much, so can we".
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