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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Out of Box Experience - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
Thanks for answering my questionand you are right
with over 50% of all PCs still running XP, it would indeed be stupid for the major SSD companies to overlook this important segment of the market
with their new SSDs ready to launch for Windows 7 machines, they should be releasing plug and play replacements for all the XP machines out there any day now..................NOT!
Are they stupid or what??
no conspiracy here folks
just the facts
Kjella - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Fact: Most computers end their life with the same hardware they started with. Only a small DIY market actually upgrades their hard disk and migrates their OS/data. So what if 50% runs XP? 49% of those won't replace their HDD with an SSD anyway. They might get a new machine with an SSD though, and almost all new machines get Windows 7 now.Cow86 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Very interesting indeed....good article too. One has to wonder though - looking at what is currently happening with 25 nm NAND in vertex 2 drives, which have lower performance and reliability than their 34 nm brethren ánd are sold at the same price without any indication - how the normal Vertex 3 will fare...Hoping they'll be as good in that regard as the original vertex 2's, and I may well indeed jump on the SSD bandwagon this year :) Been holding off for lower price (and higher performance, if I can get it without a big price hike); I want 160 GB to be able to have all my games and OS on there.lecaf - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Vertex 3 with 25 NAND will also suffer performance loss.It is not the NAND it self having the issue but the numbers of the chips. You get same capacity with half the chips, so the controller has less opportunity to write in parallel.
This is the same reason why with Crucial's C300 the larger (256) drive is faster than the smaller (128).
Speed will drop for smaller drivers but if price goes down this will be counterbalanced by larger capacity faster drives.
The "if" is very questionable of course considering that OCZ replaced NAND on current Vertex2 with no price cut (not even a change in part number; you just discover you get a slower drive after you mount it)
InsaneScientist - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Except that there are already twice as many chips as there are channels (8 channels, 16 NAND chips - see pg 3 of the article), so halving the number of chips simply brings the channel to chip ratio down to 1:1, which is hardly a problem.It's when you have unused channels that things slow down.
lecaf - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
1:1 can be a problem... depending who is the bottleneck.If NAND speed saturates the channel bandwidth then I agree there is no issue, but if the channel has available bandwidth, it could use it to feed an extra NAND and speed up things.
But that's theory ... check benchmarks here:
http://www.storagereview.com/ocz_vertex_2_25nm_rev...
Chloiber - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
It's possible to use 25nm chips with the same capacity, as OCZ is trying to do right now with the 25nm replacements of the Vertex 2.Nentor - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Why are they making these flash chips smaller if there are the lower performance and reliability problems?What is wrong with 34nm?
I can understand with cpu there are the benefits of less heat and such, but with the flash chips?
Zshazz - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
It's cheaper to produce. Less materials used and higher number of product output.semo - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
OCZ should spend less time sending out drives with no housing and work on correctly marketing and naming their 25nm Vertex 2 drives.http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=21433...
How can OCZ get away with calling a 55GB drive "60GB" and then trying to bamboozle everyone with technicalities and SandForce marketing words and abbreviations is beyond me.
It wasn't too long when they were in hot water with their jmicron Core drives and now they're doing this?