The OCZ Vector 180 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines.

The Heavy trace drops virtualization from the equation and goes a bit lighter on photo editing and gaming, making it more relevant to the majority of end-users.

The Heavy trace is actually more write-centric than The Destroyer is. A part of that is explained by the lack of virtualization because operating systems tend to be read-intensive, be that a local or virtual system. The total number of IOs is less than 10% of The Destroyer's IOs, so the Heavy trace is much easier for the drive and doesn't even overwrite the drive once.

The Heavy trace has more focus on 16KB and 32KB IO sizes, but more than half of the IOs are still either 4KB or 128KB. About 43% of the IOs are sequential with the rest being slightly more full random than pseudo-random.

In terms of queue depths the Heavy trace is even more focused on very low queue depths with three fourths happening at queue depth of one or two. 

I'm reporting the same performance metrics as in The Destroyer benchmark, but I'm running the drive in both empty and full states. Some manufacturers tend to focus intensively on peak performance on an empty drive, but in reality the drive will always contain some data. Testing the drive in full state gives us valuable information whether the drive loses performance once it's filled with data.

It sure seems like Samsung is the only manufacturer that has figured out a secret recipe to boost throughput with SATA 6Gbps because all the other drives are hitting a wall at ~290MB/s. 

In terms of latency the difference between all drives is much more marginal. The Vector 180 has a small advantage over the Extreme Pro at larger capacities, although once again the 850 Pro tops the charts.

The Vector 180 is also very consistent with only a small number of >10ms IOs. Oddly enough, the 240GB does better when it's full, although I think that might be just an anomaly since it practically makes no sense at all.

Similar to what we saw in The Destroyer benchmark, the 240GB and 480GB Vector 180 has wonderful load power characteristics and the difference to other drives is actually fairly significant.