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.
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Death666Angel - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
In one of the podcasts (E10?) Anand talks about how SF controllers have less issues with these IO latency worst case scenarios. So it's not necessarily an Intel feature, but a SF feature and the graph might look the same with a Vertex 3 etc.Also, it may behave differently if it were filled with different sequential data at the start of the test and if the test were to run longer. I wouldn't draw such a positive conclusion from the test Anand has done there. :)
jonjonjonj - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
did they have to name their 2 drives Vector and Vertex? they couldnt have picked 2 names that looked more alike if they tried. i have to image this was done on purpose for some reason that i can think of. now that ocz has its own controller are they retiring the vertex or will they just use barefoot controllers in vertex ssd's going forward?deltatux - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
While it is great that the OCZ Vector is able to compete with the Samsung SSDs in terms of performance, but OCZ's past reliability records have been iffy at most, they fail prematurely and RMA rates have been quite high. I've known countless people suffering issues with OCZ drives.I'll wait for a bit before recommending OCZ drives to anyone again due to reliability issues if the OCZ Vector can meet the reliability of Corsair, Intel or Samsung drives. Until then, I'll keep recommending Samsung drives as they exceed in performance and reliability than most manufacturers.
rob.laur - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
If you check the review of the Vector on the hardwarecanucks website, page 11 you will see the Vector AND Vertex crush every other drive listed when filled with over 50% capacity. This is probably the most important bench to judge SSD performance by."While the Vector 256GB may not have topped our charts when empty, it actually blasted ahead of every other drive available when there was actual data housed on it. To us, that’s even more important than initial performance since no one keeps their brand new drive completely empty. "
jwilliams4200 - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
If you are talking about this:http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
you will note that the Samsung 840 Pro is conspicuously absent from the list, so we do not know how the Vector fares against its most difficult competitor.
rob.laur - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
you are right and I wish they did include the 840 Pro but they didn't. Point is compared to all those other SSDs/Controllers, the BF3 clearly outperforms everything in the real world with actual data on the drive. The 840 Pro uses faster nand than the Vector yet both drives are pretty much equal. The toshiba toggle version of Vector cant come soon enough!jwilliams4200 - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
The Samsung 840 Pro is significantly faster (about 33%) than the Vector for 4KiB QD1 random reads. This is an important metric, since small random reads are the slowest operation on a drive, and if you are going to take just one figure of merit for an SSD, that is a good one.rob.laur - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
well according to most sites, the Vector beats it on writes and in mixed read/write environments especially with heavy use. Not to mention the 840 takes a long time to gets its performance back after getting hammered hard whereas the Vector recovers very quickly.jwilliams4200 - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
First of all, the type of heavy writes I believe you are referring to are a very uncommon workload for most home users, even enthusiasts. Reads are much more common.Second, I have seen only one credible study of Vector use with heavy writes, and the Samsung 840 Pro does a better than the Vector with steady-state, heavy writes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6363/ocz-vector-revi...
I have seen nothing to suggest the Vector recovers more quickly. If anything, there is circumstantial evidence that the Vector has delayed recovery after heavy writes (assuming the Vector is similar to the Vertex 4) due to the Vector's quirky "storage mode" type behavior:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-4-firmw...
jwilliams4200 - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
My first link was meant to go to storagereview:http://www.storagereview.com/ocz_vector_ssd_review