The OCZ Vertex 3 Review (120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2011 6:32 PM ESTOCZ Listens, Again
I promised you all I would look into this issue when I got back from MWC. As is usually the case, a bunch of NDAs showed up, more product releases happened and testing took longer than expected. Long story short, it took me far too long to get around to the issue of varying NAND performance in SF-1200 drives.
What put me over the edge was the performance of the 32nm Hynix drives. For the past two months everyone has been arguing over 34nm vs 25nm however the issue isn't just limited to those two NAND types. In fact, SSD manufacturers have been shipping varying NAND configurations for years now. I've got a stack of Indilinx drives with different types of NAND, all with different performance characteristics. Admittedly I haven't seen performance vary as much as it has with SandForce on 34nm IMFT vs. 25nm IMFT vs. 32nm Hynix.
I wrote OCZ's CEO, Ryan Petersen, and Executive Vice President, Alex Mei, an email outlining my concerns last week:
Here are the drives I have:
34nm Corsair F120 (Intel 34nm NAND, 64Gbit devices, 16 devices total)
34nm OCZ Vertex 2 120GB (Hynix 32nm NAND, 32Gbit devices, 32 devices total)
25nm OCZ Vertex 2 120GB (Intel 25nm NAND, 64Gbit devices, 16 devices total)Here is the average data rate of the three drives through our Heavy 2011 Storage Bench:
34nm Corsair F120 - 120.1 MB/s
34nm OCZ Vertex 2 120GB - 91.1 MB/s
25nm OCZ Vertex 2 120GB - 110.9 MB/sIt's my understanding that both of these drives (from you all) are currently shipping. We have three different drives here, based on the same controller, rated at the same performance running through a real-world workload that are posting a range of performance numbers. In the worst case comparison the F120 we have here is 30% faster than your 32nm Hynix Vertex 2.
How is this at all acceptable? Do you believe that this is an appropriate level of performance variance your customers should come to expect from OCZ?
I completely understand variance in NAND speed and that you guys have to source from multiple vendors in order to remain price competitive. But something has to change here.
Typically what happens in these situations is that there's a lot of arguing back and forth, with the company in question normally repeating some empty marketing line because admitting the truth and doing the right thing is usually too painful. Thankfully while OCZ may be a much larger organization today than just a few years ago, it still has a lot of the DNA of a small, customer-centric company.
Don't get me wrong - Ryan and I argued back and forth like we normally do. But the resolution arrived far quicker and it was far more agreeable than I expected. I asked OCZ to commit to the following:
1) Are you willing to commit, publicly and within a reasonable period of time, to introducing new SKUs (or some other form of pre-purchase labeling) when you have configurations that vary in performance by more than 3%?
2) Are you willing to commit, publicly and within a reasonable period of time, to using steady state random read/write and steady state sequential read/write using both compressible and incompressible data to determine the performance of your drives? I can offer suggestions here for how to test to expose some of these differences.
3) Finally, are you willing to commit, publicly and within a reasonable period of time, to exchanging any already purchased product for a different configuration should our readers be unhappy with what they've got?
Within 90 minutes, Alex Mei responded and gave me a firm commitment on numbers 1 and 3 on the list. Number two would have to wait for a meeting with the product team the next day. Below are his responses to my questions above:
1) Yes, I've already talked to the PM and Production team and we can release new skus that are labeled with a part number denoting the version. This can be implemented on the label on the actual product that is clearly visable on the outside of the packaging. As mentioned previously we can also provide more test data so that customers can decide based on all factors which drive is right for them.
2) Our PM team will be better able to answer this question since they manage the testing. They are already using an assortment of tests to rate drives and I am sure they are happy to have your feedback in regards to suggestions. Will get back to you on this question shortly.
3) Yes, we already currently do this. We want all our customers to be happy with the products and any customer that has a concern about thier drives is welcome to come to us, and we always look to find the best resolution for the customer whether that is an exchange to another version or a refund if that is what the customer prefers.
I should add that this conversation (and Alex's agreement) took place between the hours of 2 and 5AM:
I was upset that OCZ allowed all of this to happen in the first place. It's a costly lesson and a pain that we have to even go through this. But blanket acceptance of the right thing to do is pretty impressive.
The Terms and Resolution
After all of this back and forth here's what OCZ is committing to:
In the coming weeks (it'll take time to filter down to etailers) OCZ will introduce six new Vertex 2 SKUs that clearly identify the process node used inside: Vertex 2.25 (80GB, 160GB, 200GB) and Vertex 2.34 (60GB, 120GB, 240GB). The actual SKUs are below:
| OCZ's New SKUs | ||||
| OCZ Vertex 2 25nm Series | OCZ Vertex 2 34nm Series | |||
| OCZSSD2-2VTX200G.25 | OCZSSD2-2VTX240G.34 | |||
| OCZSSD2-2VTX160G.25 | OCZSSD2-2VTX120G.34 | |||
| OCZSSD2-2VTX80G.25 | OCZSSD2-2VTX60G.34 | |||
These drives will only use IMFT NAND - Hynix is out. The idea is that you should expect all Vertex 2.25 drives to perform the same at the same capacity point, and all Vertex 2.34 drives will perform the same at the same capacity as well. The .34 drives may be more expensive than the .25 drives, but they also may be higher performance. Not all capacities are present in the new series, OCZ is starting with the most popular ones.
OCZ will also continue to sell the regular Vertex 2. This will be the same sort of grab-bag drive that you get today. There's no guarantee of the NAND inside the drive, just that OCZ will always optimize for cost in this line.
OCZ also committed to always providing us with all available versions of their drives so we can show you what sort of performance differences exist between the various configurations.
If you purchased a Vertex 2 and ended up with lower-than-expected performance or are unhappy with your drive in any way, OCZ committed to exchanging the drive for a configuration that you are happy with. Despite not doing the right thing early on, OCZ ultimately commited to doing what was right by its customers.
As far as ratings go - OCZ has already started publishing AS-SSD performance scores for their drives, however I've been pushing OCZ to include steady state (multiple hour test runs) incompressible performance using Iometer to provide a comprehensive, repeatable set of minimum performance values for their drives. I don't have a firm commitment on this part yet but I expect OCZ will do the right thing here as well.
I should add that this will be more information than any other SandForce drive maker currently provides with their product specs, but it's a move that I hope will be mirrored by everyone else building drives with varying NAND types.
The Vertex 2 is going to be the starting point for this sort of transparency, but should there be any changes in the Vertex 3 lineup OCZ will take a similar approach.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
153 Comments
View All Comments
GrizzledYoungMan - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Thank you Anand for your vigilance and consumer advocacy. OCZ's disorganization remains a problem for their customers (and I'm one of them, running OCZ SSDs in all my systems).Still, I am disappointed by the fact that your benchmarks continue to exaggerate the different between SSDs, instead of realistically portraying the difference between SSDs that a user might notice in daily operation. Follow my thinking:
1. The main goal of buy an SSD, or upgrading an SSD from another SSD, is to improve system responsiveness as it appears to the user.
2. No user particularly cares about the raw performance of their drives as much as how much performance is really available in real-world use.
3. Thus, tests should focus on timing and comparing common operations, in both solo tasking and multi tasking scenarios (like booting, application loading, large catalog/edit files/database loading and manipulation for heavy duty desktop content creation applications and so on).
4. In particular, Sandforce is a huge concern when comparing benchmarks to real world use. Sure, they kill in the benchmarks everyone uses, but many of the most resource intensive (and especially disk intensive) desktop tasks are content creation related (photo and video, primarily) which use incompressible files. How is it that no one has investigated the performance of Sandforce in these situations?
Users here have complained that if we did only #3, only a small difference between SSDs would be apparent. But to my eyes, THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW. If the performance delta between generations of SSDs is not really significant, and the price isn't moving, then this is a problem for the industry and consumers alike.
However, creating the perception with unrealistically heavy trace programs that SSDs have significant performance differences (or that different flash types and processes have significant performance differences) when you haven't yet demonstrated that there are real world performance differences in terms of system responsiveness (if anything, you've admitted the opposite on a few occasions) strikes me as a well intentioned but ultimately irresponsible testing method.
I'm sure it's exciting to stick it to OCZ. But really, they are one manufacturer among many, and not the core issue. The core issue is this charade we're all participating in, in which we pretend to understand how SSDs really improve the user experience when we have barely scratched the surface of this issue (or are even heading in the wrong direction).
GrizzledYoungMan - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Wow, typos galore there. Too early, too much going on, too little coffee. Sorry.kmmatney - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
The Anand Storage Bench 2010 "Typical workload" is about as close as you can get (IMO) to a real work test. Maybe its a heavier multitasking scenario that most of us would use, but I think its the best test out there to give a real-world assessment of SSDs. Just read the description of the test - I think it already has what you are asking for:"The first in our benchmark suite is a light/typical usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11."
GrizzledYoungMan - Friday, April 8, 2011 - link
Actually, the storage bench is the opposite of what I'm asking for. I've written about this a couple of times, but my complaint is basically that benchmarks exaggerate the difference between SSDs, that in real world use, it might be impossible to tell one apart from another.The Anand Storage Benches might be the worst offenders in this regard, since they dutifully exaggerate the difference between SSD generations while giving the appearance of a highly precise way to test "real world" workloads.
In particular, the Sandforce architecture is an area of concern. Sure, it blows away everyone in the benchmarks, but the fact that it becomes HDD-slow when given an incompressible workload really has to be explored further. After all, the most disk-intensive desktop workloads all involve manipulating highly compressed (ie, not compressible further) image files, video files and to a lesser degree audio files. One more than one occasion, I've seen people use Sandforce drives as scratch disks for this sort of thing (given their high sequential writes, it would seem ideal) and been deeply disappointed by the resulting performance.
No response yet from Anand on this. But I'll keep posting. It's nothing personal - if anything, I'm posting here out of respect for Anand's leadership in testing.
KenPC - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Nice write up. And - excellent results getting OCZ to grow up a little bit more.As a consumer, the solution of SKU's based on NAND will be confusing and complicated. How the heck am I supposed to know if the xxx.34 or the xxx.25 or some future xxxx.Hyn34 or xxxx.IMFT25 is the one that will meet one of the many performance levels offered?
A complicating factor that you mentioned in the article, is that for a specific manufacturer and process size, there can be varying levels of NAND performance.
I strongly urge you to consider working with OCZ to 'bin' the drives with establshed benchmarks that focus on BOTH random and TRUE non-conmpressible data rates. SKU suffixes then describe the binned performance.
You also have the opportunity to help set SSD 'industry standard benchmarks' here!
Then give OCZ the license to meet those binned performance levels with the best/lowest cost methods they can establish.
But until OCZ comes up with some 'assured performance level', OCZ is just off of my SSD map.
KenPC
KenPC - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Yes, a reply to my own post......But how about a unique and novel idea?
What if.. a Vertex 2 is a Vertex 2 is a Vertex 2, as measured by ALL of the '4 pillars' of SSD performance?
Vertex 3's are Vertex 3's, and so on......
If different nand/fw/controller results in any of the parameters 'out of spec', then that version never ships as a 'Vertex 2'.
After all, varying levels of performance is why there is a vertex, a vertex 2, and an onyx and an agility, and an onyx2, and an agility2, and etc etc within the OCZ SSD line.
Why should the consumer need to have to look a second tier of detail to know the product performance?
KenPC
strikeback03 - Friday, April 8, 2011 - link
So any time Sandforce/OCZ upgrades the firmware you need a new product name? If something happened in the IMFT process and they had to buy up Samsung NAND instead, new product? And of course everyone wants to wait for reviews of the new drives before buying.I personally don't mind them changing stuff as necessary so long as they maintain some minimum performance that they advertise. The real-world benchmarks in the Storage Review articles showed a 2-5% difference, to me that is within margin of error and not a problem for anyone not benchmarking for fun. The Hynix NAND performing at only ~70% of the old ones are a problem, not so much the 25nm ones.
semo - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
You've done well. I hope you continue to do this kind of work as it benefits the general public and in this particular case, keeps the bad PR away from a very promising technology.The OCZ Core and other jmicron drives did plenty to slow down the progress of SSD adoption in to the mainstream. You caught the problem earlier than anyone else and fixed it. This time around it took you longer because of other high priority projects. I think your detective and lobbying work are what keeps us techies checking AT daily. In my opinion, the Vertex 2 section of this article deserves home page space and a catchy title!
Finally, let's not forget that OCZ have not yet fixed this issue. People may still have 25nm drives without knowing it or be capable of understanding the problems. OCZ must issue a recall of all mislabeled drives.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
It is ridiculous to expect a company to release so many SKUs based on varying NAND types. It costs a company big money to release and keep track of all those SKUs. When you look at the actual real world differences between the different NAND types, it only comes down to a few percentage points of difference. It is like comparing different types of motherboard RAM. It is a waste of time and money to even bother looking at one vs another. OCZ should just tell you all to go pound sand. I suspect they will eventually, if you keep nitpicking like this. The 25nm Vertex 2 is virtually identical to the 34nm version. If you run a complete battery of real world and synthetic tests, you clearly see that they are within a few % of each other. There is no reason for OCZ to waste any more time or money trying to placate a nitpicking nerd mob.semo - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
The real issue was that it wasn't just a few % difference. Some V2 drives were nowhere near the rated capacity with the 25nm NAND. So if you bought 2 V2 drives and they happen to be different versions, RAID wouldn't work. There is still no way to confirm if the V2 you are trying to buy is one of the affected drives as OCZ haven't issued a recall or taken out affected drives from retail shelves. Best way to avoid unnecesary hassle is not to buy OCZ at all. Corsair did a much better job at informing the customer about the transition:http://www.corsair.com/blog/force25nm/
The performance difference was higher than a few % as well.