The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
OCZ Sends Me SSDs, Once More
As I mentioned before, after the X25-M article I was somewhat blacklisted from getting more SSDs to test. Since the Core V2, I hadn’t tested a single SSD from OCZ or anyone else for that matter. Everything on the market was either based on Samsung’s SLC drive, JMicron MLC or the Intel X25 series.
Needless to say, I was excited when I got a box from OCZ.
I got the drives early in the morning. Excited, I opened them up. Inside the box were three drives. The OCZ Apex (I’d never reviewed it, and OCZ reluctantly sent another JMicron drive to me), the Vertex and the Summit.
The Summit was based on Samsung’s latest MLC SSD controller, which I’d heard great things about. It’s supposed to compete with Intel’s drive.
The Vertex is the drive I was most interested in. A value SSD that didn’t suck, or at least that’s what it seemed to be on paper. Ryan even left me a little note on the box:
O RLY?
It’s worth noting that although other SSD makers will be making drives based on the Indilinx and Samsung controllers, OCZ was the first to get me drives based on both of these controllers. In fact, I was done testing the OCZ Summit based on Samsung’s latest controller before Samsung ever offered to ship me the drive.
I pushed the Apex and Summit drives aside for now. What I wanted to know was how the Vertex performed.
I cloned my system drive and used the Vertex in my personal machine. As soon as I hit the desktop I knew there was a problem; all of my icons took longer than they should’ve to load. It took about 30 minutes of actual usage for the drive to stutter and within a couple of hours performance got so unbearable that I had to pull it out.
Sigh, the Vertex was broken.
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Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
although, I have some issues which I have put in an e-mail sent to Anand; can't wait for you response.Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
Instead of making me dinner can you send me that test system instead??? Please!!!Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
I was wondering what controller the OCZ solid Series is based on??? Will I experience hiccups with that drive or not? Is the point of my question.sfisher64 - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - link
I just purchased a Dell Latitude E6400 with a 64GB Ultra Performance Solid State Drive. Does anyone know what type of drive this is, and where it fits in the spectrum described in this article?Baffo - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
The Dells use the Samsung drives (you should see this on the bottom if you pull it out). However, as much as I wish this was one of the newer controllers (I have a few of these at work as well), the testing cycles demanded by Dell probably mean these are the older controllers.marraco - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
This article is popular :)BLHealthy4life - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) Where are these drivers? I can only find version 1007 and not 1010....Thanks
BLHealthy4life - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
found it....Intel obviously keeps the X58 chipset drivers current for their own boards, just not other mfgs boards....
They installed fine on my R2E..
BL
irondukes - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Hi-- Do SLCs suffer from performance degradation, or are the controllers pretty agressive at erasing the data since they have far longer read-write cycles? Please help! Deciding between an X25E and X25Mmdavies - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
I'm reading this about a day late - got my Patriot PE256GS25SSDR 2.5" 256GB yesterday since I'm bad about destroying hard drives. this drive, in a word, was excruciating. I'll be replacing it with one of your recommended drives today.Thanks