OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD
Dummy File Creation
When performing manual “file copy” benchmarks, the performance of the drive that the files are being copied from can directly and negatively affect the results of the drive they are being copied to. This is something that needs to be taken into consideration when benchmarking high performance hard disks such as the OCZ Vertex SSD as it’s performance easily exceeds that of a standard hard disk. Therefore, to test the write performance of each storage device a freeware utility called Dummy File Creator was used to generate files directly to each of the hard disks. The first 16GB benchmark writes a collection of files ranging in size from 1GB to 100KB, whereas the 100GB benchmark writes a single file of exactly that size to the disk.
Starting off with the 16Gb random files test, we can see that the Vertex manages to complete the creation over a minute faster than most of the drives, with the exception of the Velociraptor which still looses out by just under 50 seconds. In the 100GB file creation the gap widens further with the Vertex completing the benchmark in just under 14 minutes, whereas the Velociraptor takes just over 18 minutes and the Caviar Black more than 20 minutes.
Peazip De/Compression
To simulate the compression of various types of files, a folder containing a collection of 200 text documents filled with a combination of compressible and non-compressible contents in file sizes varying from 1KB to 100MB was copied to each of the hard disks. This folder was then compressed and decompressed using a utility called Peazip which provided an accurate “time taken” reading in milliseconds.
Interestingly there is very little difference between any of the file compression results indicating that possibly CPU performance was a limiting factor, or that there wasn’t enough compressible files in the folder to give the disk drives a proper workout. The decompression results separate the drives a little more with the Vertex completing the task in just over 15 seconds with the Velociraptor and other drives finishing in between 22-24 seconds.
