OCZ SSD 64GB ‘Core series’ Solid State Disk

HD Tune Pro

HD Tune Pro is a complete hard disk benchmarking, status and erasing utility by EFD Software. Our testing procedure involved running both the read and write benchmark tests on both the OCZ SSD, WD Velociraptor and RaptorX drives with screen shots of the results being taken at the end of each benchmark run. The results can be seen below:

 

 

 

 

It’s plain to see that the two different types of drives have very opposing results. While the Velociraptor and RaptorX start off well they tend to slow down once  the drive nears the outer edge of the platter. In stark contrast the SSD’s are constant throughout the transfer. The Core series not only remains constant but is by far the quickest drive of the bunch, beating the best conventional drive out there aswell as nailing its older brother, the OCZ SSD.

 

 

 

 

This is where I was hoping to see some improvement from the OCZ drive but sadly the write speed is still a weakness for the SSD. While the average write speed on the OCZ Core drive is respectable I was alarmed at the write speed to such an extent that I believed the drive to be faulty. A quick call to OCZ however confirmed that the drive was fine and it was actually the way that HDtune benchmarks, using small 1mb files. If these small files fall into a single block all is well, however if the files straddle over 2 blocks then the performance appears to be affected but this is not indicative of ‘real world’ performance. To verify OCZ’s claims we also ran a quick test of the OCZ with ATTO:

 

 

 

Sure enough, ATTO showed average write speeds of 80mb/s which is more inline with OCZ’s specs. It appears that the OCZ Core series SSD doesn’t like using very small files but can handle the read/write of larger files with ease. Lets see if this performance does indeed translate to ‘Real World’ performance’…