The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The OCZ Vertex Turbo: Overclocked Indilinx
I’ll have to give it to OCZ’s CEO Ryan Petersen, he always tries. The SSD race is once again heating up and he’s determined to compete on more than just price. OCZ’s entire Indilinx line of drives are going to be cheaper (at least in cost per GB) than Intel’s, but OCZ is also adding new drives to the lineup.
The Vertex and Agility we’re both familiar with. The Vertex EX is the SLC version and now we have the Vertex Turbo. The Turbo is a Vertex but with a faster controller and DRAM cache: 180MHz vs. 166MHz for the stock Vertex. It's not a physically different controller, it's just one that has been binned to run at 180MHz. OCZ helps Indilinx validate its drives and in exchange for that, Indilinx gives OCZ the exclusivity on 180MHz controllers.
We’re talking about an 8% increase in controller and DRAM frequency. If we’re lucky, we might reduce the time some instructions take to complete by a few nanoseconds. The problem is that we’re fundamentally bottlenecked by the performance of the NAND flash itself, which operates on the order of microseconds. In other words: don’t expect a performance boost.
We've already seen that these Indilinx drives can vary in performance by a few percent from drive to drive, so in order to make the comparison as accurate as possible I did all of my tests on the Vertex Turbo. After I was done running my Turbo tests I simply threw on the standard Vertex firmware, which specifies a 166MHz controller/DRAM clock.
| New Performance | OCZ Vertex | OCZ Vertex Turbo | Turbo Advantage |
| 4KB Random Write | 13.2 MB/s | 13.6 MB/s | 3% |
| 2MB Sequential Write | 175.9 MB/s | 184.2 MB/s | 4.7% |
As expected, there’s very little performance difference here. You'd see the same sorts of differences between two different Indilinx MLC drives. My Torqx sample from Patriot was as fast as my Vertex Turbo sample. OCZ charges a huge premium for the Turbo drive though:
| Price for 128GB | |
| OCZ Vertex | $369.00 |
| OCZ Vertex Turbo | $439.00 |
| Turbo Premium | 19% |
It's up to the price of a 160GB Intel X25-M G2, absolutely not worth it. I talked with Ryan Petersen, OCZ's CEO about the Turbo and its lack of value. As usual, we argued a bit but eventually gave me his vision. He wants to bring 180MHz controllers to all Vertex drives, and not charge premiums for it. His intentions are to improve how competitive OCZ's drives are in a sea of equal-performing Indilinx drives.
While I wouldn't recommend spending more money on the Turbo, if OCZ brings 180MHz controllers to all of its drives I won't complain.
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Abjuk - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Agreed CM, my current project at work takes about six minutes to build from scratch and CPU usage never gets above about 35%. The process is totally IO bound.It really depends on whether you have several large source files or several hundred small ones.
Weyzer - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Good article and testing, but why was the Crucial M225 not mentioned at all? It's performance is similar to the vertex drives, I know, but I think it could have been mentioned somewhere, if it is in the good or bad range.jasperjones - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
javascript:link('frmText') $997 @ Newegg omgomgomgNeedless to say, that price will come down quickly. So more seriously, after reading the article I really feel I understand better what to look for in an SSD. Thanks!
paesan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Wow, does NE really think that anyone will buy the Intel drive at that price. OMG!!! Funny thing, it is in stock and it says limit 1 per customer. LolCList - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Obviously someone is buying them at that price or they'd lower it. The people who can't wait two or three weeks and are willing to be gouged for these drives are the ones that allow NewEgg to give us low margins on other products while not going out of business :Dravaneli - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I just decided to buy one and when I opened newegg i couldn't believe my eyes. I hope that is only because they have a few drives left, and once Intel pumps up some stock in the retailers the prices will go back to Intel's retail.Does anyone know what are the production capabilities of Intel's SSD factories? I don't want to wait a whole year until the market saturates.
LazierSaid - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
This article was so good that Newegg doubled their X25M G2 prices overnight.medi01 - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Yep, very impressive advertisement indeed.HVAC - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I'd rather have ewoks in the sequels than Jar-jar ...Naccah - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Newegg's prices on all the Intel SSDs skyrocketed. The X-25 G2s are $499 now. Is this price a reflection of the high demand or did Intel change the price again?