OCZ's Vertex 2, Special Sauce SF-1200 Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2010 3:17 PM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
This test reads/writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
I've had to run this test two different ways thanks to the way the newer controllers handle write alignment. Without a manually aligned partition, Windows XP executes writes on sector aligned boundaries while most modern OSes write with 4K alignment. Some controllers take this into account when mapping LBAs to page addresses, which generates additional overhead but makes for relatively similar performance regardless of OS/partition alignment. Other controllers skip the management overhead and just perform worse under Windows XP without partition alignment as file system writes are not automatically aligned with the SSD's internal pages.
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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...