OCZ Vertex TURBO 120GB Solid State Drive
Dummy File Creation
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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.
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Unreal Tournament 3 Level Loading
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With a fresh copy of Vista installed on each hard disk, the final test was to find out if the Windows loading times seen above would also be applicable to the map loading time of a popular PC game. Once again, the test procedure was quite simple: Install Unreal Tournament III, load the game, select a map to play (ONS-Torlan) and measure the time taken from pressing the “Begin” button to the time the map is fully loaded. This procedure was repeated a total of three times on each of the hard disks, with a reboot in between each test to clear system memory.
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Vista Boot/Shutdown Time
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Quite a simple and self explanatory test. We took each of the disks, installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista SP1 on to them and measured the time each took to boot into the Windows desktop and display a text file placed in the startup folder. To ensure that the tests were fair the results were averaged over initial reboots. Shutdown time was also recorded, although this generally happened so quick that accuracy was hard to obtain.
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Results Analysis
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While the Gskill drive appeared to be better at random file creation, the OCZ Vertex Turbo was the quicker drive over the much longer test of 100GB. The GSkill just took the spoils in the Unreal Tournament III level loading test while the OCZ won overall with the Vista boot time/shutdown. This goes to show that you cannot place too much faith in synthetic benchmarks because if I were to go off these ‘realworld test’ then the OCZ Vertex Turbo would clearly be the higher performing drive.
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Let’s head over to the conclusion where I will try to give my overall view of the OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB SSD…
