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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iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
also listed at newegg for $179.99iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
please delete the above comment.DukeN - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Until this has been out a year, that's all this amounts to.I'd rather pay for Intel/Crucial reliability than be OCZ's unpaid beta tester.
ceast3 - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link
The previous poster was correct, OCZ fixed the BSOD problem, not intel. Sandforce then released their fix to the other Manufacturers. Sandforce was the problem.... fact. So far all feedback is great with the Vertex 4, if that continues until Ivy Bridge and nothing better comes out, I'll be getting one! Vertex 3 and all other SF-2000 based SSD's showed problems right away, so I'm not worried.alfatekpt - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link
Why is your recommendation the Samsung's SSD 830 instead of OCZ vertex 3?Reliability?
Snigel - Sunday, April 22, 2012 - link
It's interesting to see the max values of power consumption, but it would also be interesting to factor in the speed of the drives.Usually a desktop user have a fixed amount of data that the disk needs to transfer, so continous load wattage is not that interesting compared to how much energy that is required to get the job done.
wattage * transfer time
For continous loads it would be more interesting to see something like
transfer speed / wattage
How much performance do I get compared to the energy I put in?
I could do these calculations manually of course, but I don't know how the write tests in the power consumption part are performed, so I cannot get the speed data from other charts.
vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
An SSD will be idle nearly all the time in nearly all desktop and laptop use cases. When the idle power consumption is > 1W, it doesn't much matter what the load power consumption is.Winning29 - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zo
I'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.
Bluemars_ - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - link
New firmware 1.4's out, does it fix the low queue depth sequential read performance?twindragon6 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
From OCZ's website."CURRENT FIRMWARE RELEASE is v1.4.1.3"
I'm curious to see how this drive performs now with the newer firmware.