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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jeffrey - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Anand,I would love to have seen results using the 1.5 firmware for the 256GB Vertex 4. Going from 1.4 to 1.5 is non destructive. The inconsistency of graphs in other SSD reviews that included the 512GB Vertex 4 drive with 1.5 firmware and the 256GB Vertex 4 drive with 1.4 firmware drove me nuts.
When I saw the Barefoot 3 press release on Yahoo Finance, I immediately went to your site hoping to see the review. I was happy to see the article up, but when I saw your review sample was 256GB I feared you would not have updated the firmware on the Vertex 4 yet. Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed. I love your site, that's why I'm sharing my $.02 as a loyal reader.
Take care,
Jeffrey
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Some of the results are actually using the 1.5 firmware (IO consistency, steady state 4KB random write performance). We didn't notice a big performance difference between 1.4 and 1.5 which is why I didn't rerun on 1.5 for everything.Take care,
Anand
iwod - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Isn't this similar? Sandforce comes in, reached top speed in SATA 6Gbps, then other controller, Marvell, Barefoot managed to catch up. That is exactly what happen before with SATA 3Gbps Port. So in 2013 we would have controller and SSD all offering similar performance bottlenecked by its Port Speed.When are we going to see SATA Express that give us 20Gbps? We need those ASAP.
A5 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
SATA Express (on PCIe 3.0) will top out at 16 Gbps until PCIe 4.0 is out. This is the same bandwidth as single-channel DDR3-2133, by the way, so 16 Gbps should be plenty of performance for the next several years.extide - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Actually I believe Single Channel DDR-2133 is 16GiB a sec, not Gb a sec, so Sata Express is only ~1/8th the speed of single channel DDR3-2133jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
It is good to see anandtech including results of performance consistency tests under a heavy write workload. However, there is a small or addition you should make for these results to be much more useful.You fill the SSDs up to 100% with sequential writes and I assume (I did not see a specification in your article) do 100% full-span 4KQD32 random writes. I agree that will give a good idea of worst-case performance, but unfortunately it does not give a good idea of how someone with that heavy a writeload would use these consumer SSDs.
Note that the consumer SSDs only have about 7% spare area reserved. However, if you overprovision them, some (all?) of them may make good use of the extra reserved space. The Intel S3700 only makes available 200GB / 264GiB of flash, which comes to 70.6% available, or 29.4% of the on-board flash is reserved as spare area.
What happens if you overprovision the Vector a similar amount? Or to take a round number, only use 80% of the available capacity of 256GB, which comes to just under 205GB.
I don't know how well the Vector uses the extra reserved space, but I do know that it makes a HUGE improvement on the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro. Below are some graphs of my own tests on the 840 Pro. I included graphs of Throughput vs. GB written, as well as latency vs. time. One the 80% graphs, I first wrote to all the sectors up to the 80% mark, then I did a 80% span 4KQD32 random write. On the 100% graphs, I did basically the same as anandtech did, filling up 100% of the LBAs then doing a 100% full-span 4KQD32 random write. Note that when the 840 Pro is only used up to 80%, it improves by a factor of about 4 in throughput, and about 15 in average latency (more than a 100 times improvement in max latency). It is approaching the performance of the Intel S3700. If I used 70% instead of 80% (to match the S3700), perhaps it would be even better.
Here are some links to my test data graphs:
http://i.imgur.com/MRZAM.png
http://i.imgur.com/Vvo1H.png
http://i.imgur.com/eYj7w.png
http://i.imgur.com/AMYoe.png
Ictus - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Just so I am clear, did you actually re create the partition utilitizing 80% of the space, or just keep the used space at 80% ?jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
No partitions, no filesystems. I'm just writing to the raw device. In the 80% case, I just avoided writing to any LBAs higher than 80%.JellyRoll - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Excellent testing, very relevant, and thanks for sharing. How do you feel that the lack of TRIM in this type of testing affects the results? Do you feel that testing without a partition and TRIM would not provide an accurate depiction of real world performance?jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
I just re-read your comment, and I thought perhaps you were asking about sequence of events instead of what I just answered you. The sequence is pretty much irrelevant since I did a secure erase before starting to write to the SSD.1) Secure erase SSD
2) Write to all LBAs up to 80%
3) 80% span 4KQD32 random write