OCZ Vertex 4 Review (256GB, 512GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTRIM Performance
I started out this review with a mention of estimated write amplification and how OCZ was able to significantly reduce it with the Vertex 4/Everest 2 compared to Octane/Everest 1. By reducing write amplification, OCZ should have also significantly improved worst case write performance when TRIM isn't available or before it's able to act.
To find out, I wrote sequential data across all user addressable LBAs and then wrote random data (4KB, QD=32) for 20 minutes across all LBAs. Finally I used HDTach to give me a simple visualization of write performance across all available LBAs (aka the Malventano Method):
This is a huge improvement over what we saw with the Octane. Behavior here isn't quite what we see with Intel's controllers, but again it's a huge step above what we saw in the previous generation.
The Vertex 4 does support idle time garbage collection, but at very low priority. The drive must be idle for at least an hour for the background GC to kick in. I'm glad to see that OCZ has taken a more conservative route here as I've never been a huge fan of idle time garbage collection to begin with.
If you don't leave the drive alone long enough to trigger the idle GC, as soon as 85% of the blocks on the drive are used up the Vertex 4 will automatically trigger its garbage collection algorithms. This is more of what I'd like to see, however I'd prefer it even more if OCZ lowered the limits of when it would start recycling blocks in order to try and maintain good performance under heavily fragmented conditions.
TRIM is alive and well on the drive – a single TRIM pass is able to restore performance to new:
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hechacker1 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I'm not really sure if they are buffering that much data. I'm betting a lot of it is to cache the state of the available flash (tables and bitmaps), and to provide lots of room so you can use memory intensive algorithms to allocate, sort, and combine data before it gets place on the flash.Even with some cache, just because the SSD is so fast, it's going to empty it in 1 second.
vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
As long as it's not too much RAM to write out before the energy in the caps runs out, it's not really a problem.7Enigma - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
But you can show all these pretty specs and graphs but until you fix something like this catastrophe I will avoid your SSD's like the plague:Oh and what controller is in this beauty......Indilinx Everest!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=PSa...
Comdrpopnfresh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
It's nice to see the AES-256 encryption on it. That'll come in handy when the drive dies and has to be sent back to OCZ.I have 2 vertex2's and a vertex3, all of which died, and I have yet to eat or rma- OCZ provides no way to fulfill the warranty without compromising the security of user data. Used to be a big fan of OCZ, and loved their ssds... until this situation arose THREE TIMES.
vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
Sure they do -- encrypt it yourself in software. Anyway, why would you trust OCZ not to be able to decrypt data encrypted by closed-source firmware designed by OCZ?Hurk - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
where is the data for the 128gb version? it will be significantly different from the 256/512, and since im really loving SSD caching on new system builds, the smaller drive is more important to see the numbers for than the 256/512 for me.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Manufacturers often send bigger capacities for reviews (they are the highest performing ones, after all). I'm sure there will be a 128GB review once we get one, which is hopefully sooner than later :-)Reikon - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Nice referral link there.JarredWalton - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
No worries -- they've been marked as spam and are gone now. Let this serve as a warning to others: if you try to put in a referral link in a comment and we mark you as spam, all your comments go bye bye!iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
sorry about that. c an you delete my last entry below. didn't see any TOS against referral links.