OCZ Vertex 3 Preview: Faster and Cheaper than the Vertex 3 Pro
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 24, 2011 9:02 AM ESTFaster than the Vertex 3 Pro?
SandForce’s specs put the SF-2281 at up to 500MB/s reads and writes, just like the SF-2582/2682. OCZ’s specs for the Vertex 3 however put it slightly above the performance of the Vertex 3 Pro:
I asked SandForce to explain the discrepancy. It turns out that SandForce doesn’t really enforce its specs on its partners. It’s up to the partner to test and advertise whatever it would like as long as it can back those claims up. In this case, the Micron 25nm NAND appears to perform a bit better than the 32nm Toshiba NAND that was used on the Vertex 3 Pro. As a result, sequential write speeds are slightly higher.
OCZ also rates the Vertex 3 as having slightly lower random write performance than the Vertex 3 Pro, but the difference is not that great in practice.
For desktop performance this does mean that the Vertex 3 will likely be a bit faster than the Vertex 3 Pro we previewed a week ago. You trade off enterprise level features for price, but you don't sacrifice performance.
The Test
I'll point out once more that this is beta hardware running beta firmware. I've only had the Vertex 3 for a matter of days before publishing this and that's honestly not enough time to put it through anything more than a handful of performance tests. Real reliability and bug testing will take weeks if not months. Keep that in mind if you decide to be an early adopter on one of these drives.
| CPU | Intel Core i7 965 running at 3.2GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) - for AT SB 2011 |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) Intel H67 Motherboard |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe Intel H67 |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
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FunBunny2 - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Well, no custom firmware, just a custom controller. Intel had the first really good pro-sumer controller. Likely still does.bhougha10 - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Anand,can you give us an idea when the intel G3 will be comming out so we have an idea wait the field looks like here. Intel seems to keep this stuff very secret :(
mckirkus - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
510 Series from Intel launching March 1 if you believe the rumors. Sata 6Gb/s but using 34nm flash. Just over $2/GB. Seems like it has low IOPS compared to other SSDs but real world performance is TBD.I'd bet a dollar Anand is working on a review of one right now. I'm using a 1st gen Sandforce drive and it's so damn fast I'm not sure I'll ever need to upgrade the thing.
iwod - Friday, February 25, 2011 - link
Not a Rumors, someone from Taiwan already has their hands on it.It uses an Marvel Chipset.
At this moment we are still not sure if 510 series means G3.
JonnyBlaze - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Not a bad idea.lorteti - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,How about a power consumption test.
For those that want to use the Vertex3 in a notebook.
Thanks,
jx
JFish222 - Sunday, February 27, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,I'd like to second this request.
I'd love to throw one of these into my laptop, but I'm always looking to balance performance with battery life (the old T61 is getting long in the tooth and an SSD sounds like a perfect upgrade!)
All of the recommendations to add SSD's to "netbook class units" (atom and Brazos) adds to this conversation. Though netbooks are popular due to their low price, their portability and battery life (which one could argue are one and the same) are also selling points.
Thanks again for the great review, and I'm looking forward to your future investigations into the OCZ debacle. Journalism has always been about both informing and inciting change. Anandtech remains the only site on the net that I've found that has the reach to do both.
Thanks again,
Jordan
MarcHFR - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Dear all, Dear Anand,I think it's important to note that AnandTech Storage Bench, like PC Mark Vantage HDD, represent a "best case" for SandForce based SSD.
These benchmarks are based on logs which have recorded accesses to be repeated, but not the data contained in these accesses. These means that the data used in the benchmark may well be highly compressible, which isn’t necessarily the case in real usage.
Am i wrong ?
Chloiber - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I wanted to ask the same thing in the Vertex 3 Pro test. Would be nice to have an answer here. I don't think that the data is random.jwilliams4200 - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I've also wondered about that. Does the 2011 Storage Bench that writes 100+ GB of data have a 100+ GB data file? If so, how much does that data file compress when run through a zip or 7zip compression program?If not, if the data file is much smaller than 100 GB, then exactly what is being written to the drives?