OCZ Vector (256GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 27, 2012 9:10 PM ESTFinal Words
With the Vector, OCZ has built a price and performance competitor to Samsung's SSD 840 Pro, which previously remained peerless at the top of our charts. For a company that just weeks ago was considered down and out for the count, this is beyond impressive. Samsung has emerged as one of the strongest players in the consumer SSD space, and OCZ appears ready to challenge it. In our tests, Samsung typically enjoys better peak performance, but OCZ's Vector appears to have the advantage when it comes to worst case performance and IO consistency. The latter tend to be more valuable in improving overall user experience in my opinion. I would still like to see an S3700-class client drive and I'd be willing to give up top-end performance to get there, but I suspect that's a tall order for now.
The Vector's power consumption under load, given the performance it's able to deliver, is excellent. I wish idle power consumption were better, making the 830/840 Pro a better fit for ultra mobile applications. But under load the Vector and 840 Pro are indistinguishable from one another.
The only downside to the Vector really is its price, which like the 840 Pro is at a definite premium vs competition from the previous generation. As with all SSDs however, I fully expect Barefoot 3 and maybe even the Vector itself to fall in price over time. If you want the latest and greatest available today, Samsung's 840 Pro now has competition in OCZ's Vector.
The Barefoot 3 controller is quite promising. It certainly seems very capable from a performance standpoint without blowing through its power budget. It's no small feat if OCZ's best in-house silicon can be spoken of in the same sentence as Samsung's. The PLX and Indilinx acquisitions appear to have paid off. I'm curious to see how OCZ's improved validation and reliability testing fare in the long run. This isn't the first time that OCZ has promised to focus more on validation, but with Vector I do get the feeling that things are different. I didn't run into any compatibility issues or reliability problems with the Vector in my testing, but as always the proof is what happens when these drives make their way into the hands of end users.
Overall I'm impressed by the Vector. It's a huge improvement over the already good Vertex 4, and manages to compete in a different league by fixing some lingering performance issues with its predecessor. I had resigned myself to assuming no one would come close to Samsung on the high-end, but it's good to be proven wrong. Should OCZ be able to deliver Samsung-like performance and reliability, then I'll really be impressed.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
151 Comments
View All Comments
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
No NDA. All we are talking about is basic operation of the device. If you cannot explain that to everyone, then you are not worth much as a support person.I asked two questions, which you still have not answered:
1) How do you explain the HD Tune results on HardOCP that I linked to?
2) If storage mode and performance mode are the same speed, then why bother having two modes? Why call one "performance"?
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
By the way, it seems like your explanation is, if you do this, and only this, and do not do that, and do this other thing, but do not do that other thing, then the performance of OCZ SSDs will be good.So I have another question for you. Why should anyone bother with all that rigamarole, when they can buy a Samsung 840 Pro for the same price, and you can use it however you want and get good performance?
That is basically the original question from Death666Angel.
Death666Angel - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Heh, didn't think I'd break off such a discussion. jwilliams is right about what my question would be. And just showing a graph that does not have the slow down in the 2nd 50% is not proof that the issue of a slow down in the 2nd 50% does not exist (as it has been shown by other sites and you cannot tell us why they saw that). I also don't care about the rearranging of the NAND that takes place between the 2 operation modes, that slow down is irrelevant to me. What I do care about is that there are 2 different modes, one operating when the disc is less than 50% full, the other operating over that threshold, and that I will only use the slower one because I won't buy a 512GB drive just to have 256GB useable space. And if they two modes have exactly the same speed, why have them at all? NDA information about something as vital as that is bullshit btw. :)HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
...these drives idle a lot more of the time than they work at full speed. A considerably higher idle is just bad all around.I don't think OCZ's part warrants the price they're asking. Its performance is less most of the time, its a power hog, its obviously hotter, it has the downsides of their 50% scheme, and it has OCZ's (Less Than) "Stellar" track record of firmware blitzkrieg to go along with it.
I wonder, how many times will I lose all my data while constantly updating its firmware? 10? 20 times?
fwip - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
If the drive is idle 24/7 for an entire year, it will cost you less than a dollar, when compared to running no drive at all."Power hog" is pretty relative.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Be careful what you wish for. I been reading horror stories about the 840!A5 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
From where? I haven't seen any.Brahmzy - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
That was beta firmware that Samsung has admitted had a problem. They said all retail drives shipped with the newer, fixed firmware. There have been ZERO reported failures of retail 840 Pro drives.designerfx - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
I keep wanting to buy an SSD, but every time I wait the prices drop and the performance increases substantially.How long are we going to wait for 1-2TB SSD's? Bring them on already at reasonable prices ($250)!
mark53916 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Anand(tech) did lots of good testing, but seems to have left out copy performance.Copy performance can be less than one tenth of the read or write performance,
even after taking into account that copying a file takes 2 times the interface bandwidth
of moving the file one direction over a single directional interface. (Seeing that
one drive is only able to copy less than 10MB/second, compared to 200MB for
another drive when both each can both read or write faster than 400MB/s over a
6Gb/s interface is much more important than seeing that one can read
500MB/s and the other only at 400MB/s.)
I use actual copy commands (for single files and trees) and the same
on TrueCrypt volumes, as well as HD Tune Pro File Benchmark for these
tests. (For HD Tune Pro the difference between 4 KB random single
and multi is often the telling point.)
I'd also like to see the performance of the OCZ Vector at 1/2 capacity.
I'd also like to see how the OCZ Vector 512GB performs on the
Oracle Swingbench benchmark. It would be interesting to see
how wht Vector at 1/2 capacity compares to the Intel SSD DC S7300.