OCZ Vertex 4 Review (256GB, 512GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPCMark 7
The storage suite in PCMark 7 validates a lot of what we've seen thus far. Despite great write performance, the Vertex 4 can't outperform the Vertex 3 because of its read speed limitations. From OCZ's perspective however, the gap is narrow enough in overall tests to make the shift away from SandForce likely worthwhile. The Vertex 4 doesn't care about compressible vs. incompressible data and it keeps more of the drive's BOM cost in house compared to the Vertex 3.
It's worth noting that for sufficiently light workloads, the difference in performance between any modern SSD is going to be limited right off the bat. We're talking about a 6% spread between the slowest and fastest drive here. For many users, simply finding the right balance of price and reliability is sufficient - which happens to be one of the reasons we've been such big fans of Samsung's SSD 830.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
127 Comments
View All Comments
elghosto - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
linux#fstrim
Per Hansson - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
"monitoring port of the SSD"Please enlighten me, Google was no help...
Is it a hardware interface that allows you to see how the drive operates?
adamantinepiggy - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Basically, every SSD has some sort of real-time data port that allows engineers to monitor what is going on with the SSD, even when the drive hangs or has other issues. It is used mainly for development/testing. Consider it sorta like a way to read/access the dump file when Windows BSOD's, except in this case it's on the SSD. This monitoring port gets disabled on released drive firmware and the hardware attachment leads are unattached..jonup - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Thanks for asking this! I always wanted to know that myself. I actually google it to no avail while I was reading the article.medys - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
How long till we are overclocking our SSD processors :-/FunBunny2 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Umm. How you gonna fit that water cooler inside the case?Iketh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
hahaha... NEVER!! I've yet to break a Win7 installation from overclocking, but I broke XP many times... I shudder at the thought of overclocking an SSD :)Iketh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Although, I wonder how long until the processors in SSDs reach, say, today's single-core Atom... OR better yet, how long before the SSD controller is built into the CPU much like the memory controller, where we install more storage the same way we install ram... and then later again the nand controller and RAM controller merge, and a computer is nothing more than a SoC with some nand sitting next to it...iwod - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
We finally have controller that are able to bump out MB faster then Sandforce without using some silly compression engine. Marvell also announced next Gen SSD controller as well.Again we have reached the limit of SATA 6Gbps, we will need to start thinking about SATA Express, Lower power consumption, reliability. etc...
akbo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Though I think the high consumption might be because of the controller, the chip is huge! With thermy sticky!Wonder when a die shrink of this is possible.