OCZ Vertex 3 Preview: Faster and Cheaper than the Vertex 3 Pro

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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.