OCZ's Vertex 2, Special Sauce SF-1200 Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2010 3:17 PM ESTStarting with the Differences: Power Consumption
I’ll spoil the surprise up front: the Vertex 2 performs identically to Corsair’s Force drives, as expected. This is a good thing since those drives perform as well as the Vertex LE, which in turn are generally faster than Intel’s X25-M and second only to Crucial’s C300 in some cases.
Unless we stumble upon any other issues with the RC firmware, the difference between these drives amounts to power consumption.
At idle the Vertex 2 actually uses more power than Corsair’s Force F100 - 0.65W vs. 0.57W. The Vertex LE also exhibits the same lower power consumption, so I wonder if it’s related to the earlier firmware revision (I haven’t updated my LE to 3.0.5/1.05 yet).
Under load we see a larger difference between the Vertex 2 and the F100. The Corsair drive pulls 1.25W in our sequential write test compared to 0.97W from the Vertex 2. For desktop users the power consumption differences won’t matter, this is really more of an academic or notebook discussion.
Power consumption during heavy random writes is closer between the two drives, but the Force still draws a tad bit more.
For notebook users it appears to be a tradeoff - lower power consumption at idle or lower power consumption under load. I’d argue that the former is just as important, but it really varies based on usage model.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
marraco - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
The data compression accelerates the writing speed, but, the question is:The OS still considers that the non written space is occupied?
Or the compression releases the non used space?
I suspect that the unused space is marked anyways as used space, but I would like a confirmation.
TheHolmes - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
If Sandforce is largely about writing fewer bits to the NAND flash, wouldn't it also follow that turning on OS level compression would also work as well?Also, I'd be interested to know if using OS striping is ok with TRIM, as there aren't any controllers out there that work with TRIM when SSDs are striped.
cyrexo - Friday, April 30, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,have you put a Sandforce based disk into a mabook and let it running only on OSX?
Can you say something about speeddrops without Trim or does the build in "gc" wich isn't "gc" can handle it accurate?
i get my hands on a new I7 macbook and want to put a sdd into but i don't know if i should go for the old intels, use the new sandforce or wait some moths to see what intel does and how stable sandforce is without trim.
529th - Tuesday, September 28, 2010 - link
What is the verdict with these Vertex 2 100g SSD drives???Because I just got one in the mail from OCZ as a replacement for my dead Vertex LE 100G SF1500
Anand, care to comment as they have been in your desktop for ~ 5 months now.. or anyone who owns one???
Thanks,
529th
p.s. i am considering a main rig install with this, booting out my ever reliable 150g 1st gen Raptor...