OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS & Patriot Wildfire SSDs Reviewed

TRIM Performance

In practice, SandForce based drives running a desktop workload do very well and typically boast an average write amplification below 1 (more writes to the device than actual writes to NAND). My personal SF-1200 drive had a write amplification of around 0.6 after several months of use. However if subjected to a workload composed entirely of incompressible writes (e.g. tons of compressed images, videos and music) you can back the controller into a corner.

To simulate this I filled the drive with incompressible data, ran a 4KB (100% LBA space, QD32) random write test with incompressible data for an hour, and then ran AS-SSD (another incompressible data test) to see how low performance could get:

I usually run this test for only 20 minutes but after seeing an unusually resilient performance by the 240GB drives I decided to extend the test period to a full 60 minutes. Performance does drop pretty far at that point, down to a meager 50MB/s. TRIMing the drive does restore some performance but not all. If you have a workload that uses a lot of incompressible data (e.g. JPGs, H.264 videos, highly random datasets etc...) then SandForce just isn't for you.

Power Consumption

The MAX IOPS drive does use significantly more power than the regular Vertex 3, particularly under heavy load with incompressible data. There are more NAND die firing in parallel which results in higher power consumption. For a notebook that's going to be on battery power most of the time, you may want to consider a standard SF-2281 with 25nm IMFT NAND.