OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD
Conclusion
Published: 11th April 2009 | Source: OCZ | Price: 362.24 |
Conclusion
The Western Digital Velociraptor, Caviar Black and Samsung F1 drives may be among the fastest mechanical SATA disks on the market, but as we've seen today they are absolutely no match for the OCZ Vertex. In benchmarks such as HDTune and ATTO the Vertex produced read and write results almost double that of the ageing platter spinners and as if that wasn't enough humiliation, the Vertex totally dominated PCMark Vantage with some results coming out over 10x higher than than the rest of the drives. Simply awesome.
Unlike our original testing of the "OCZ SSD" the Vertex also produced tangible benefits in Windows start-up and game loading times. Unreal Tournament III went from menu to map in 1/2 the time of the popular Samsung F1 1TB hard disk, while Vista SP1 booted in screamingly fast 24 seconds - 7 seconds faster than the Velociraptor. Similarly the time taken to copy a massive 100GB file to the disk was also completed a whopping 4 minutes faster than its nearest competitor.
I'm sure many of you will be reading this review wondering if the 'stuttering' issues apparent on so many SSD's is also an issue on the Vertex. It's not. After using the Vertex as a primary OS drive in our test system for the past two weeks and also transferring the Vertex to my personal Macbook, no slowdown, stuttering or freezing issues were experienced what-so-ever.
As a final note, it'd be negligent of us to end this review without mentioning that capacity and price are still a little way off that of the mechanical drives. However, bearing in mind that 2009 has been filled with releases of new GPU's and Chipsets that offer little to no visual improvements in performance, 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.
The Good
- Read/Write speeds up to 100MB/s faster than some of the best SSD Hard Disks on the market.
- Extremely low latency.
- Visual benefits in Windows start-up, game loading and file copying.
- SSD's have inherently lower power consumption - useful for Laptops.
- Totally silent. More than can be said for the Western Digital (Verloci)Raptor drives.
The Mediocre
- 2yr Warranty. Most mechanical hard drives have ~5yrs.
- Price still quite high, but you get much more for your money than last year.
- Package really basic. Throw in some drive bay mounts goddamit!
The Bad
- No time to make a cuppa while waiting for file transfers :)
Thanks to OCZ for providing the Vertex for review. Discuss this review in our forums.
Most Recent Comments
Nice speeds, the price still lets them down though
*Checks bank balance*
Great performance but surely the cost needs to come down and the capacity up for them to become viable for the mainstream.
Very nice review, thanks for the read.
He would be stupid to run it off an onboard RAID controller! As Monkey said, I hope it is on a dedicated RAID card!
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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.
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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..
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Originally Posted by name='Luigi'
A very very valid point, something I've been thinking about for quite a while..
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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.
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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. |
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
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Originally Posted by name='Bungral'
Jimbo... Please tell me you aren't gonna keep it in the Mac???
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@ £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.
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Originally Posted by name='Jim'
Lol nah...I thought about it....then i smacked my head against the wall.
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Originally Posted by name='Bungral'
Good man.... We would have had to part ways in our friendship otherwise!
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On another note, the Macbook comes out of suspend in 0.00001 seconds anyway. So no need to reduce boot times
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OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD