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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semo - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Thanks for looking in to the issue Anand. Could you also find out whether Revo drives are affected as well?I'm surprised that Anandtech did not make any mention of the 25nm drives (it could have warned a lot of people of the shortcomings)
erson - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Anand, on page 3 - "In this case 4GB of the 256GB of NAND is reserved for data parity and the remaining 62GB is used for block replacement (either cleaning or bad block replacement)."I believe that should be 52GB instead of 62GB.
Keep up the good work!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
So there's technically only 186GiB out of 256GiB of NAND available for user consumption. 4GiB is used for RAISE, the remaining 66GiB (the 62GiB is a typo) is kept as spare area.Take care,
Anand
marraco - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Some data are written once, and never deleted. They are read again and again all the time.Such cells would last much longer than the rest.
I wish to know if the controller is smart enough to move that rarely written data to the most used cells. That would enlarge the life of those cells, and release the less used cells, whose life will last longer.
Chloiber - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure every modern Controller does that to a certain degree. It's called static and dynamic wear leveling.philosofa - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Anand, you said that prices for the consumer Vertex 3 drives will probably be above those of the Vertex 2 series - is that a resultant increase in capacity, or will we see no (near term) price/size benefits from the move to 25nm nand?vhx - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
I am curious as to why there is no Vertex/2 comparison?jonup - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Given the controversy with the currently shipped Vertex2s Anand chose to use F120 (similar if not identical to the Vertex2) .theagentsmith - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Hello Anandgreat article as always and hope you're enjoying the nice city of Barcelona.
I've read some articles suggesting to create a RAM disk, easily done with PCs with 6-8GBs, and move all the temporary folders, as well as page file and browser caches to that.
They say this could bring better performance as well as reduce random data written to the SSD, albeit the last one isn't such a big problem as you said in the article.
Can you become a mythbuster and tell us if there are tangible improvements or if it just doesn't worth it? Can it make the system unstable?
Quindor - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Maybe you missed this in the article, but as stated, with heavy usage of 7GB writing per day, it still will last you way beyond the warranty period of the drive. As such, maybe your temp files and browser cache, etc. to a ram drive won't really bring you much, because your drive is not going to die of it anyway.Better performance might be a different point. But the reason to buy an SSD is for great performance. Why then try to enhance this with a ram drive, that will only bring marginal performance gains. Doing so with a HDD might be a whole different thing together.
My idea is that these temp files are temp files, and that if keeping them in memory would be so much faster, the applications would do this themselves. Also, leaving more memory free might give windows disk caching the chance to do exactly the same as your ram drive is doing for you.