OCZ's Vertex 2, Special Sauce SF-1200 Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2010 3:17 PM ESTFinal Words
SandForce has come a long way in a very short period of time. The current version of the SF-1200 firmware is deemed production worthy and we should see the first Agility 2 and Vertex 2 drives show up at etailers in the next week or so. The drives have done very well in our tests as well as in my personal systems, although I still recommend waiting to see if any strange bugs crop up over the coming months if you’re not fond of making potentially risky purchases.
Our coverage over the past few weeks should mean today’s Vertex 2 review is no real surprise. You get the performance of Corsair’s Force F100 drive but with SandForce’s mass production (3.0.5) firmware. For the majority of desktop users I’m not sure there’s much point to the extra small file random write performance, but if you have a workload that demands it - the Vertex 2 doesn’t disappoint.
The Agility 2 seems to make more sense for most desktop users. You don’t save a ton of money but you also don’t appear to lose any real world performance either. The cost per GB of these drives is still higher than Intel’s X25-M, but you do get a corresponding increase in performance.
One thing that hurts the cost structure of these SandForce drives is the 28% of the NAND dedicated to spare area. SandForce originally told me that we’d see drives with 7% overprovisioning after the SF-1200s hit. I wonder how that will impact performance...
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marraco - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
The data compression accelerates the writing speed, but, the question is:The OS still considers that the non written space is occupied?
Or the compression releases the non used space?
I suspect that the unused space is marked anyways as used space, but I would like a confirmation.
TheHolmes - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
If Sandforce is largely about writing fewer bits to the NAND flash, wouldn't it also follow that turning on OS level compression would also work as well?Also, I'd be interested to know if using OS striping is ok with TRIM, as there aren't any controllers out there that work with TRIM when SSDs are striped.
cyrexo - Friday, April 30, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,have you put a Sandforce based disk into a mabook and let it running only on OSX?
Can you say something about speeddrops without Trim or does the build in "gc" wich isn't "gc" can handle it accurate?
i get my hands on a new I7 macbook and want to put a sdd into but i don't know if i should go for the old intels, use the new sandforce or wait some moths to see what intel does and how stable sandforce is without trim.
529th - Tuesday, September 28, 2010 - link
What is the verdict with these Vertex 2 100g SSD drives???Because I just got one in the mail from OCZ as a replacement for my dead Vertex LE 100G SF1500
Anand, care to comment as they have been in your desktop for ~ 5 months now.. or anyone who owns one???
Thanks,
529th
p.s. i am considering a main rig install with this, booting out my ever reliable 150g 1st gen Raptor...