OCZ Vertex 3 Preview: Faster and Cheaper than the Vertex 3 Pro
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 24, 2011 9:02 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 6Gbps drives.
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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seapeople - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I think the answer you are searching for is a bit more mundane than you desire. For example, when you load a map you are storage limited whether you have an SSD or not, and when you are fighting bad guys you are CPU limited whether you have a slow HD or not.vol7ron - Saturday, February 26, 2011 - link
While that's true, I'm not sure that's what he's referring to.If you're ever CPU limited, it's probably not just because of an SSD, it's just the fact that you need a better CPU. Generally, CPU limitations are apparent from memory access, not due to SSDs.
I can understand what he's saying though as I'm still running a C2D and it gets to 100% during games. Not to mention, there does seems to be hang ups on Win7 64b startup, due to all the applications, widgets, and services that load; but that's less to do with the SSD and more to do with the CPU. The load time would be just as long w/o the SSD, it's just that there wouldn't be as much of a hang-up as the sluggishness would be constant.
Having more cores in this instance would certainly help.
Nentor - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
First paragraph:"What wasn’t impressive however was the price."
There is not a word about price in the article about the V3Pro. Not even a slight indication implying a high price which made it seem affordable.
Also this:
---I asked OCZ if this meant the drive I was testing wasn’t representative of final, shipping performance. OCZ stated very clearly that performance will not change between the drive I have today and the drive that goes on sale in the next 2 months.
SandForce wouldn’t comment on any existing agreements and OCZ said it couldn’t get SandForce to confirm that the V3’s performance wouldn’t change between now and its eventual release.---
What exactly does that mean? It comes down to not meaning anything at all to me.
ClagMaster - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I went half-way through this article and was frustrated with the complexity of the SandForce Controller capabilities and firmware games.It would seem SandForce is very Intel-like in its conduct. Why cannot they have 2-3 stinking controllers setup for maximum performance without these firmware games ? The hardware is willing but the businessmen are not.
Last night I was about ready to purchase a 120GB SSD but decided this was an extravagance for my desktop for $220. I would rather have a good Western Digital Black 1.0 TB harddrive than this SSD. I get much more for my money. I still use Windows XP Home because of its efficiency and minimalist memory foot print. Are there any garbage collection utilities I can use for this still excellent OS? This is not clear from the vendor sights.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what is available for Windows XP so these SSD's continue to operate in prime form ?
I cannot believe consumers are willing to pay this kind of money so they shave off 15 to 20 seconds off boottimes.
86waterpumper - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I agree whole-heartedly with you about the frimware games...that is def. lameness.With that being said, I don't think that ocz drives are really more expensive than other brands so I guess the solution for now is just to buy their drives instead of the competitions which is exactly what they want right? haha.
I disagree though with you about ssd not being worth it. I know they are high, but shaving 15 to 20 seconds off boot time is huge in my book. I mean that is half the time in alot of cases. That has a coolness factor to it, but the main benefit I see is being
able to multitask better, and having programs and games load faster. The boot time is just a side benefit really. Quietness and low heat and power draw are other nice features. Anyway I remember people were happy to pay the price for raptors not long ago, and they were this expensive and much less capacity than regular drives. They did not represent nearly the performance gap either.
Barbaniko - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Anand,How about Garbage collection on the Vertex 3?
How would it hold up over time without access to winnows 7 trim command?
I am interested in putting two of these in a Raid 0 configuration.
Thank you.
arm3n - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
I second this request. Would love to get your take on these bad boys striped.Thanks!
Armen
gstrickler - Friday, February 25, 2011 - link
Anand,I've been searching for reliable information about the AES encryption on SF based SSDs. From the information I've been able to get from the manufacturers, this is NOT TCG "OPAL" compatible FDE, it's passive encryption that does not require any BIOS support, TCM, or boot time password. If that's accurate, then it's almost useless. It doesn't protect your data if your SSD is stolen. Therefore, it is of limited value.
What that does do is protect the data from being recovered from the NAND Flash chips on a failed SSD, and executing a "erase" ATA command will change the password and make all your data, including bad blocks and reserved overallocation areas, inaccessible after the erase. Clearly, that has value to those reallocating a used drive, but that's about the extent of it's value.
There is certainly some value in that, as securely erasing the data from an SSD can be challenging because of the LBA->Flash block remapping that SSDs perform. However, if it doesn't support "OPAL" FDE, then you must fall back to software FDE and the performance penalty for software FDE on an SSD is far more significant than it is for a HDD, and effectively eliminates much of the performance benefit of an SSD.
Please check with SandForce and/or the SSD vendors and report if any of them support TCG compatible "OPAL" FDE. That information is vital to users who need to use FDE.
ac2 - Friday, February 25, 2011 - link
+1The AES encryption bit sounds like one of those meaningless marketing bullet points...
iwod - Friday, February 25, 2011 - link
The Anand SSD benchmarks 2010 and 2011 are the closest we get to real life measurements.And if those results are correct. Then our previous estimation of Seq Read Write become not important as we move faster will be incorrect. It turns out most of our time we are doing Seq Read Write. Therefore it is the Random Read Write has reach its tipping point and not providing any more Real World Improvement to users.