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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ErikO - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
It has been over two years, since I took the plunge for SSD, and on my third one, (Intel SLC), I'm loving it, as McDonalds marketing team would surely love everyone to say.I started with that woeful OCZ SSD, (that created more noise than the Mohammad Cartoons in the world).
They sent me a second one by some way of peace offering (I wrote them from the address of a small tech site I own), but public reviews said they were just as bad. Sold on Ebay with no reserve. (almost got my money back too)
Then a year ago, my wallet allowed for a 160GB X25-M. That was -worlds- better, but still every now and then (once an hour?) my music would skip - and I recognised that as MLC behaviour. This would be the high-latency small-file-size writes then. But as an audiophile, who does actually connect his computer to his hi-fi (via a dedicated sound card of course), this meant noticable breaks in a high output system. Not cool in front of guests.
So a couple of weeks back, I bought the 64GB X25-E. This was everything I had hoped for. This is what I expected SSDs would give us from day one. The size of the disk is painful though, but I digress.
My question is...with all these much higher results out there, am I really going to perceive much of a difference in system-wide performance? Intel seems to be dropping SLC as far as I can see, and based on my experience, I don't think I can / could turn my back on SLC technology again...!
So where is all the talk of the X25-E - of recent? They are for sale everywhere, but the internet seems almost dead to their existance. Too small? Too expensive?
Even if I can be convinced into a Vertex, I will definately have to pay the high admission cost for the pro...I'd happily sacrifice some speed for consistancy of performance.
Gents, let me know what you know?
Thanks.
SeattleGeek - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Will the 128GB model perform the same as the 256GB model that is reviewed?Also, do they have the same number of channels?
sean.crees - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Where are the benchmarks for the Vertex 2? I'd really like to see how exactly the new Vertex 3 compares to the drive it's supposed to replace.Dssguy1 - Monday, April 18, 2011 - link
Because we know OCZ is infamous for trickery, I would like to know if you got some kind of "super juiced-up" version of the drive for review.It would make me feel a lot better about dropping $550 (basically because I just did), if I knew that the review SSD you tested, matches what we are getting when we buy the Retail version.
davele - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
Based on what you describe I wonder if this testing is really a representative snapshot of any common use pattern.ie: Application installs - typically this is a once off activity. Any one machine only installs a finite number of applications. (the exception being a SCOM based virtual desktop where the entire systems is installed each time a user logs on. But that is Enterprise & they are very unlikely to put SSD's in user workstations)
For Enterprise SSD benchmarks please consider profiling a SQL Server system running both normal OLTP app & a Sharepoint app.
The OLTP would give you huge numbers of 4K & 64K random writes, while the logs would give you largely a sequential write. The Sharepoint app is a heavy BLOB store, So this would give you the a random set of large sequential I/O, with much more Read than Write.
The advantage of this is you can backup the database, capture the I/O requests. Then each test is just a restore & replay of the requests. Easy, repeatable & extremely representative of Heavy I/O workload. Especially an enterprise class load.