OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 17, 2011 3:01 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2010
To keep things consistent we've also included our older Storage Bench. Note that the old storage test system doesn't have a SATA 6Gbps controller, so we only have one result for the Vertex 3 Pro (and the C300). The SF-2500 controller does respectably here, but with a 3Gbps controller we're only marginally faster than other SSDs (which is why we've moved to a new storage platform for 2011).
The first in our benchmark suite is a light/typical usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
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slickr - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Now this is what I'm talking about about reviews/previews. Tons of benchmarks at various settings and loads. You can really make a difference now and see how the drives perform.I would also like a good old fashion test with Starcraft 2, how long it takes to load a 5-6mb custom map.
I would also like another test where you select 30 files and open them at the same time and see how much time it takes to open all. I'm talking about selecting few 3-5mb images, few MP4 360p videos, few H.264 720p videos, dozen office documents from 500kb up to 3mb, several applications like GPU-z, skype, Live, Xfire, firefox etc... and opening few highly compressed script files.
MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
smaller process, less reliability, and higher price? We've been waiting for years fr prices to become reasonable next to magnetic storage but there's been barely a drop at all, and the drops that do come (smaller processes, supposedly) reduce reliability. At this point I don't see myself ever getting one for my desktop.Laptops sure, hard drives die there all the time, and I don't use them as my primary machine. Smaller storage requirements + hard drives dying far more often in laptops makes SSDs the better choice for me there.
Chloiber - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
I do generally agree. I don't want faster drives, I want cheaper drives. They are already very fast. Of course, faster is always better but at the moment I prefer low price and reliabilty over speed.seapeople - Friday, February 18, 2011 - link
Seriously... I don't need a brand new controller that might or might not be reliable and is so fast that it would still seem fast if I taped myself using the computer and replayed it in slow motion. What I want is an x25m-like drive at 160 GB for under $200. Still extremely fast, legendary (for SSD's) reliability, and make it affordable.The reason I don't buy Ferrari's right now is not because I don't think they're fast enough, it's because they COST too much.
RU482 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
this might be the problem with OCZ. They are an SSD marketing company with a manufacturing divisionTimK - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Damn, Anand, so this is what an engineering degree will get you, not to mention some heavy duty skill at writing. Comprehensive and comprehensible. Thanks very much. At your recommendation I bought an early Vertex 30GB SSD for my unibody MacBook. From time to time I take it out, thinking to have everything in one place on a bigger drive, but I just can't let go of the speed. It's still working great.dlang1234 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
The Samsung 470 seems to be in a lot of the benchmarks but not all, and seems to do well in every one that it is listed in.I can't seem to find a review of it here, but would be interested in it possibly.
markjx1 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
No mention of the fact this thing was originally slated with the SF-2000 controller, which proved to be plagued with problems in the lab and the dirty little secret no vendor would discuss at CES which was why no one had anything SF-2000 based up and running. And now OCZ had to resort to slapping Sandforce's enterprise class SF-2500 controller on it.Great except its going to be hella expensive and not cost competitive with the Crucial C400 unless OCZ bleeds margin, and given they took a $25 million bank loan recently, well let's just say OCZ isn't a company I'd rely on to fulfill a warranty replacement a couple years down the road when your drive dies.
Lastly, notice the "hardware isn't final" disclaimers all over the article. This is nothing more than OCZ trying to get some buzz, and have painted themselves into a corner now if they go switching back to the SF-2000 since they've already set expectations high.
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
I thought the article was fairly well done. The only problem I have with it is a passing mention to the SSD being unusuable on a Macbook Pro, and yet not a single benchmark shows any problems with the SSD. It seems the benchmark suite Anand is using needs to have some more components added. Perhaps a latency test?Anand Lal Shimpi - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
Check back on the site by the end of the week ;)Take care,
Anand