OCZ ARC 100 (240GB) SSD Review

Final Words

The ARC 100 provides what I expected it to do, which is its strength and weakness. The Barefoot 3 platform does provide excellent performance consistency and it has proven to be reliable over the last two years, but the performance in lighter workloads is only mediocre. I am glad that OCZ pursues consistency, but the truth is that average client workloads are more about peak performance as IOs tend to happen in bursts. Think about application installing and launching for instance – they stress the drive a lot but only for a short period of time and afterwards the drive will mostly be idling until another similar request comes in. It is true that an average user will most likely not notice the difference between two modern SSDs, but I still would have liked to see the ARC 100 being more optimized for lighter client workloads.

Another shortcoming of the ARC 100 is its lack of support for lower power states and TCG Opal. With most of today's PCs being laptops, OCZ is missing the needs of a huge market. I am guessing that there are some limitations in the Barefoot 3 silicon itself that prohibit OCZ from implementing proper low power state support – or at least that is what I hope because otherwise there is no good explanation as to why the Barefoot 3 continues to use so much power at idle. OCZ's next generation controller will support both DevSleep and Opal encryption, but in the meantime I can only recommend Barefoot 3 based SSDs for desktops.

Pricing appears to be competitive, although beating the MX100 is very tough. At capacities of 120GB and 240GB the ARC 100 is effectively the same price as the MX100, but I would like to see the 480GB drop in price to be more competitive. The mainstream market is all about price, so the ARC 100 cannot be $20 more expensive than the MX100 if OCZ wants to compete. Then again, 480GB/512GB SSDs aren't the normal target for mainstream users, so it may not matter too much.

I have to say that the MX100 is still my recommendation for most people because the feature set and value are just amazing, but the ARC 100 is a compelling alternative for desktop users. The better performance consistency makes the ARC 100 more suitable for heavier workloads, so for a user with a heavy-ish IO workload and a tight budget the ARC 100 is a great option.