The OCZ Octane Review (512GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2011 12:00 PM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
Testing TRIM functionality is important because it gives us insight into the drive's garbage collection algorithms. OCZ insists the Octane has idle time garbage collection, a remnant of the original Indilinx drives, however in my testing I could not get the idle GC to do anything once I put the drive into a highly fragmented state. Let's start at the beginning though. The easiest way to ensure real time garbage collection is working is to fill the drive with data and then write sequentially across the drive. All LBAs will have data in them and any additional writes will force the controller to allocate from the drive's pool of spare area. This path shouldn't have any bottlenecks in it; the process should be seamless. As we've already seen from our Iometer numbers, sequential write performance at low queue depths is around 280MB/s. A quick HD Tach pass of a completely full drive gives us the same result:
The Octane works as expected here, but now what happens if we subject the drive to a ton of 4KB random writes? Unfortunately this is where the Octane falls short. If we just throw a few minutes of random writes, constrained to a small LBA range, at the Octane its performance hardly varies:
However once the Octane passes a threshold of fragmentation, the performance drop is considerable. Our standard test involves a 20 minute, 4KB random write across all LBAs at a queue depth of 32. A sequential write pass across the drive afterwards took place at between 2 and 7MB/s. Since our test drive was a 512GB model, there simply wasn't enough time to conduct a full pass in the course of preparing this review. Instead I did a shorter test with HD Tach to give you some indication of what happens to the Octane under a highy random load without TRIM:
Performance drops considerably. A single TRIM pass restores performance to new. I did have one TRIM test where only the latter half of the drive seemed to TRIM but I couldn't get the same result more than once. Now the question is, what does all of this mean?
If you have TRIM enabled on a desktop platform with a client (read: non-server) workload, none of this should matter to you. TRIM works and there doesn't appear to be any weird lag or bottlenecks in the GC path. If you don't have TRIM enabled (read: OS X) with a client workload, this could warrant a pass. The only reason I'm hesitant to recommend the Octane for use with a TRIM-less OS X installation is because I'm not entirely sure the drive will recover from this ultra low performance state without TRIM. Sequential writing alone may not be enough to adequately restore the Octane's performance. Normally idle GC would be enough, but it seems as if things get slow enough the drive's idle GC can't do much. I suspect all of this is stuff that OCZ can tweak via firmware, but I need more time with the drive to really be certain.
Finally if you're deploying a server with lots of random writes, the Octane isn't for you. OCZ will eventually release an Everest based drive for the enterprise, but the Octane is not that drive.
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Taft12 - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Anand, do you have any insight into how the SSD industry's volume breakdown goes WRT size?I would be shocked if drives > 128GB made up more than 5% of shipments of consumer-class SSDs. I realize that hardware vendors want their product seen in the best possible light, but this 512GB drive might move a couple thousand units total globally whereas the 128GB version might see a couple orders of magnitude more.
Sunrise089 - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
I echo both the request-for-info-on/suspicion of the breakdown in shipments between 128gb models and 512gb models. I also very much echo the desire for more reviews of 128gb drives.I get this is what you get sent, but one of the reasons I love Anandtech is that you guys will actually play hardball with the manufacturers. I'm not telling you to refuse to review 512/256gb drives unless you're sent a 128gb model too, but at the same time I doubt you'd only review Extreme Edition CPUs or dual-GPU video cards.
niva - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Thanks a bunch Anand, it's amazing how the perception for OCZ has changed, I remember the days when it was a "stay away from" company. Personally I still haven't bought an OCZ product after getting stuck with dead RAM modules (one outright, one with errors) years ago and having no recourse.Still, competition is good, and OCZ has done a lot to bring prices down for SSDs. Hope they succeed in the long term. I was also really tentative about the Indilux acquisition, but so far it's a definite success.
james.jwb - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
pretty much all the OCZ memory modules i had over time died prematurely. Bad luck i guess.inighthawki - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
I own 4 1GB modules that are a good 5+ years old, all still work fine.PubFiction - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link
Well I do not know how much it has changed overall I would say I still have a negative view of OCZ. They just seem to be a decent marketing machine but they put out alot of garbage. They constantly have sales on bad products which people jump on to try and then get burned. Right now and for months their SSDs which have reliability and firm ware issues are all going on sale for hard to resist prices. I had ram from them that while it still works had a sticker that was so thick it had to be removed in order to fit in the slots. Of course that was on sale too which is why I tried it. Instead of really fixing problems or avoiding them they tend to just drop prices and sell more of it. We also just went through the whole different slower nand on the same part fiasco.inighthawki - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Ah, ok. As someone looking into buying a new SSD soon, I sure would like to see how the 128GB version pairs up vs other SSDs in the same range. Hopefully you will extend the review at some point if you get different models :PDigitalFreak - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
I wonder about that also. Seems like all the review sites got the 512GB model.hackztor - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
hum, still seem to like the vertex 3 better. This could be good, but the other day newegg had a nice sale for the vertex 3 120gb max iops for 150. Really cannot beat that. I think the key though is benchmarks are getting overrated because these drives are so fast especially compared to hard drives. They need to have a reliability chart, that would be lol. I know I went through 4 vertex 1 drives before ocz upgraded me to vertex 2 so I am somewhat hesitant.mckirkus - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Given that the vast majority of people (according to top sellers at NewEgg) buy drives in the 60 to 128 GB range, it seems odd that they're rarely represented in benchmarks. It'd be interesting to know what percentage of their sales are 512GB drives.