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Comment [21] Email to Friend Printable Version

OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD

Test Setup

Published: 11th April 2009 | Source: OCZ | Price: 362.24 | Author: James Napier

Test Setup & Settings

In our original reviews of the OCZ SSD and Core SSD drives a comparison was made to the highest performing mechanical SATA-II based drives available on the market at that time. Their performance was somewhat underwhelming, managing to just about match the performance of the traditional platter based drives while only offering a fraction of the storage space. With the Apex 120GB it would appear that OCZ have upped the anti, and for this reason we're going to give the SSD a chance to redeem its self by once again placing it up against some of the fastest mechanical drives we could get our hands on. The selection of drives can be seen below:

Unfortunately the results from our earlier SSD reviews could not be included in the graphs for the Vertex drive due to an entirely different benchmarking platform and test suite being used. However, as some of the results do appear to be quite similar to our original testing, we may refer to these results over the next few pages. Below are the specifications of the system used to conduct the testing of the above drives:

It is also worth noting that in order to obtain the best performance from the Vertex, the following additional steps were performed prior to benchmarking:

• Drive firmware upgraded to the latest version available on OCZ's website (1275)
• Primary partition was aligned as per OCZ's recommendations
• Drive was formatted with NTFS and a 4096 byte cluster size.
• SATA Mode in BIOS was set to IDE for all hard disks.
• 'Enable Advanced Performance' was selected in device manager for all hard disks.

While synthetic benchmarks such as HDTune 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 transfer and Windows startup) in addition to synthetic benchmarks. The full set of tests can be seen below:

Now we've got that out of the way let's move on to the results... 

Most Recent Comments

11-04-2009, 16:57:28

Jim

"With a read speed of 250MB/s, the OCZ Vertex serves up some serious speed....just not on a platter! Check out our review inside."

http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/artic...192840868s.jpg

OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD

11-04-2009, 17:01:54

PeterStoba

Coming to a server near you soon?

Nice speeds, the price still lets them down though

11-04-2009, 17:03:51

AntiHeroUK

Great review Jim. I'm glad to see that the stutter that plagued previous SSDs has been eradicated. The price is still a little high, but it's good to see OCZ progressing with their SSD line-up.

*Checks bank balance*

11-04-2009, 17:46:04

w3bbo

Good review mate.

Great performance but surely the cost needs to come down and the capacity up for them to become viable for the mainstream.

11-04-2009, 18:13:52

°TheMadDutchDude°

Fantastic to see them coming along like this. However, prices let me down hugely and therefore I won't be getting one for at least another year. I wish the prices would come down faster and become more main stream like 500GB HDDs

11-04-2009, 18:28:18

monkey7

Price is going down, continue that trend and we might all buy one next year Very nice review, thanks for the read.

11-04-2009, 18:30:42

nepas

wow!I did not know they cost that much,have just been reading a build log where some guy has bought 8 of these babys!!would love to have a few in raid for myself

11-04-2009, 18:31:52

°TheMadDutchDude°

8!? Wow, serious speeds there. I reckon he is going to be topping 1750MB/s read/write speeds! Imagine the boot/load times! *Drools....*

11-04-2009, 18:32:54

monkey7

I hope he's put that on a PCI-e controller? :s I don't think the average northbridge is able of keeping up with that.

11-04-2009, 19:06:46

°TheMadDutchDude°

SouthBridge is the one you're after mate, the NB controlls other things

He would be stupid to run it off an onboard RAID controller! As Monkey said, I hope it is on a dedicated RAID card!

11-04-2009, 19:07:17

Thanh55

This is awesome performance, I decide to get one for my benching machine then. Very nice review Jim.

11-04-2009, 19:11:25

nepas

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='monkey7' I hope he's put that on a PCI-e controller? :s I don't think the average northbridge is able of keeping up with that.

yeah he has a dell perc i5 or something

12-04-2009, 04:36:30

Luigi

replacing your OS hard disk with an SSD such as the Vertex instead of spending £300 on that 'new' graphics card just makes so much more sense.

A very very valid point, something I've been thinking about for quite a while..

12-04-2009, 05:48:05

Jim

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='Luigi' A very very valid point, something I've been thinking about for quite a while..

Yeah for some reason I think quite a lot of people get stuck in the FPS trap. Upgrading to new graphics cards that make absolutely no difference to the games they play (other than fraps results) instead of investing in something like an SSD.

Yes it's expensive, yes it's 1/10th of the size of an F1 which costs 1/3rd of the price, but the performance is something you can see and appreciate.

12-04-2009, 05:57:06

Luigi

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='Jim' Yeah for some reason I think quite a lot of people get stuck in the FPS trap. Upgrading to new graphics cards that make absolutely no difference to the games they play (other than fraps results) instead of investing in something like an SSD. Yes it's expensive, yes it's 1/10th of the size of an F1 which costs 1/3rd of the price, but the performance is something you can see and appreciate.

And.. you only need 60gb for vista and a fair few games, which is plenty.

The way I see it, my 260 can play all the games I want to play, so upgrading will have virtually no effect apart from emptying my wallet. An SSD on the other hand, will mean that pretty much everything will be noticeably faster- that's worth having

I liked the review Jim, but my wallet didn't

14-04-2009, 12:54:52

Bungral

Jimbo... Please tell me you aren't gonna keep it in the Mac???

14-04-2009, 15:09:00

Jim

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='Bungral' Jimbo... Please tell me you aren't gonna keep it in the Mac???

Lol nah...I thought about it....then i smacked my head against the wall.

14-04-2009, 19:33:15

Rastalovich

With respect, I seen the price and didn't think it was worth digesting any further.

@ £280 for 120g, even if it went at the full bus-capable speed, it's failed immediately.

£120 for 280g is still bad. Old physical drives are going to be rolling out 2Tb drives before we know it.

In all honesty, by the time price comes down, or the tech is overlooked by something more sensible, the performance figures of the product will be completely different.

15-04-2009, 05:16:05

Bungral

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='Jim' Lol nah...I thought about it....then i smacked my head against the wall.

Good man.... We would have had to part ways in our friendship otherwise!

15-04-2009, 11:21:02

Jim

Quote:

Originally Posted by name='Bungral' Good man.... We would have had to part ways in our friendship otherwise!

Friendship remains intact. I'm waiting for them to hit retailers so I can buy another one and RAID them for some super sexy speeds

On another note, the Macbook comes out of suspend in 0.00001 seconds anyway. So no need to reduce boot times

16-04-2009, 17:17:12

Bungral

Pah.. Suspend smuhspend...

03-05-2009, 03:20:23

kimandsally

How good do you think the other drives in the range would be? We can see OCZ rate them differently but the ratings on this drive are different to reality.

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