The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

The Test

If you’ve managed to make it this far in the article then I owe you a great deal of gratitude. While I’d offer to make you dinner it’d probably be a little impractical, so instead I’ll help you find out how these SSDs perform.

Note that every single benchmark here was run with the drive in a “used” state. Again, I did so by performing a secure erase on the drive, filling it to capacity, then restoring my test bed image over the partition. I can definitely make the drives benchmark faster, but I’m trying to provide performance data that shows you how your drive will behave after you’ve owned it for a while.

To make the benchmarks all that more stressful and realistic, I kept Avast Anti-Virus running and scanning every file accessed in the background of all of my non-suite and non-synthetic tests. Basically everything that was hand-timed. Firmware 0122 is utilized for this review.  OCZ recently released firmware revision 1199 that we are testing currently and another release (1275) is expected shortly.  We will provide an update if there is a significant difference in performance or the user experience routines.