OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 17, 2011 3:01 AM ESTFinal Words
I didn't really believe that SandForce could pull it off when I first heard how fast the SF-2000 line would be. Even after CES, I didn't really believe the drives would be this good in real world use cases. Consider me pleasantly surprised.
When connected to a good 6Gbps controller, the Vertex 3 Pro is significantly faster than anything else on the market today. Obviously the V3P itself is an unreleased drive so things could change as its competitors show up as well, but the bar has been set very high. The Vertex 3 Pro is the first SSD to really put 6Gbps SATA to good use. In fact I'd say its the first drive that really needs a 6Gbps interface. Whenever you Sandy Bridge owners get replacement motherboards, this may be the SSD you'll want to pair with them.
Even writing incompressible data the Vertex 3 Pro is faster than current SandForce drives running full tilt. The performance gains we see here are generational, not a simple evolutionary improvement. SandForce has also successfully addressed the limited shortcomings of the original SF-1200 controller with regards to writing incompressible data.
Clearly performance isn't going to be a problem with this generation. The real unknowns are how well will the Vertex 3 (non-Pro) perform and how reliable will these drives be? Intel is still king of the hill when it comes to drive reliability, however OCZ has been investing heavily in improving its manufacturing. I suspect that this next SSD war will be fought both along performance and reliability lines. Unfortunately for us, the latter is very difficult to quantify without a significant sample of drives.
With new controllers from SandForce, Intel and Marvell due out this year we're going to see SSD performance go through the roof and SSD prices to continue to fall. We're still a couple months away from knowing exactly what to buy, but if you've been putting off that move to an SSD - 2011 may be the year to finally pull the trigger.
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abrar - Friday, February 18, 2011 - link
"In this particular drive the user (who happened to be me) wrote 1900GB to the drive (roughly 7.7GB per day over 8 months) and the SF-1200 controller in turn threw away 800GB and only wrote 1100GB to the flash. This includes garbage collection and all of the internal management stuff the controller does."how did you calculate this data ?
have you used any special software?
douglaswilliams - Friday, February 18, 2011 - link
Anand,Will these very fast read rates speed up virus scans?
Thank you for being technical and thorough,
Douglas
Qapa - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
ALL disk reads are this fast, so of course this will have an impact in virus scanning.But mostly, it will have an impact that your system is faster, although those resource hogs (virus scanning programs) are running - and yes, their bottleneck were reading the files from the disk.
semo - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
I've noticed that MSE is mostly limited by CPU and it isn't multithreaded so even worse notebooks where the CPU freq. might be lowerjoeld - Friday, February 18, 2011 - link
I don't believe any of the SF-1200 makers actually supported encryption on the drive, so the password was basically blank. Are the folks bringing the SF-2500 to market actually going to support disk passwords so that full-disk encryption requirements for laptops will be met? Software based full disk encryption is just too slow and flawed when paired with SSD drives...faster - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Props to OCZ for leading the performance market on multiple levels.Looking at the prices of these new high performance SSDs, including the upcoming offerings from Intel, the OCZ Revodrive X2 is looking like a value. With Revodrive's read/write of 740/720, even this next generation of drives doesn't even come close. Now that newegg sells the 240GB x2, on sale, for $540 ($679 not on sale), it is a better bang for the buck than the new drives. The revodrive is a product that has been out for a while and is available right now. If you have the open PCIe slot, it seems like a no-brainer to pick the X2.
croc - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
Sadly, (well maybe not so sadly) we Aussies are not allowed gun ownership. There are exceptions, but generally not... So the final conclusion, "2011 may be the year to finally pull the trigger." does not really apply. However, maybe the right year to finally purchase an SSD, time (and further testing) will tell.MamiyaOtaru - Monday, February 21, 2011 - link
time doesn't "tell" anything. It's an abstract concept. I mean if you're going to take issue with idioms..Qapa - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
It would also be interesting to have in the benchs:- 1 "normal" 7200 HDD
- 1 "normal" 5400 laptop HDD
This would be interesting to compare since, most people do not own Velociraptors and this way we would be able to better know the system improvement on buying an SSD, and convincing other people - like our bosses - to upgrade our computers at work as well :)
compvter - Monday, February 21, 2011 - link
@faster Thats because they have two (old) sf controllers in the card. Think about the speeds they get with two of these (sf-2000 family) i would guess it will be around 1GB/s (read&write). At least current revodrives lack trim support so, that might be deal breaker for some ppl.