OCZ Vector (256GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 27, 2012 9:10 PM ESTFinal Words
With the Vector, OCZ has built a price and performance competitor to Samsung's SSD 840 Pro, which previously remained peerless at the top of our charts. For a company that just weeks ago was considered down and out for the count, this is beyond impressive. Samsung has emerged as one of the strongest players in the consumer SSD space, and OCZ appears ready to challenge it. In our tests, Samsung typically enjoys better peak performance, but OCZ's Vector appears to have the advantage when it comes to worst case performance and IO consistency. The latter tend to be more valuable in improving overall user experience in my opinion. I would still like to see an S3700-class client drive and I'd be willing to give up top-end performance to get there, but I suspect that's a tall order for now.
The Vector's power consumption under load, given the performance it's able to deliver, is excellent. I wish idle power consumption were better, making the 830/840 Pro a better fit for ultra mobile applications. But under load the Vector and 840 Pro are indistinguishable from one another.
The only downside to the Vector really is its price, which like the 840 Pro is at a definite premium vs competition from the previous generation. As with all SSDs however, I fully expect Barefoot 3 and maybe even the Vector itself to fall in price over time. If you want the latest and greatest available today, Samsung's 840 Pro now has competition in OCZ's Vector.
The Barefoot 3 controller is quite promising. It certainly seems very capable from a performance standpoint without blowing through its power budget. It's no small feat if OCZ's best in-house silicon can be spoken of in the same sentence as Samsung's. The PLX and Indilinx acquisitions appear to have paid off. I'm curious to see how OCZ's improved validation and reliability testing fare in the long run. This isn't the first time that OCZ has promised to focus more on validation, but with Vector I do get the feeling that things are different. I didn't run into any compatibility issues or reliability problems with the Vector in my testing, but as always the proof is what happens when these drives make their way into the hands of end users.
Overall I'm impressed by the Vector. It's a huge improvement over the already good Vertex 4, and manages to compete in a different league by fixing some lingering performance issues with its predecessor. I had resigned myself to assuming no one would come close to Samsung on the high-end, but it's good to be proven wrong. Should OCZ be able to deliver Samsung-like performance and reliability, then I'll really be impressed.
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kmmatney - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
I don't see anything wrong with stating that. My 256 Samsung 830 also appears as a 238GB drive in windows...jwilliams4200 - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
The problem is that "formatting" a drive does not change the capacity.Windows is displaying the capacity in GiB, not GB. It is just Windows bug that they label their units incorrectly.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Yes and no. There is some overhead in formatting which reduces usable capacity, but the GiB/GB distinction is a much larger factor in the discrepancy.jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
The GiB/GB bug in Windows accounts for almost all of the difference. It is not worth mentioning that partitioning usually leaves 1MiB of space at the beginning of the drive. 256GB = 238.4186GiB. If you subtract 1MiB from that, it is 238.4176GiB. So why bother to split hairs?Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
This is correct. I changed the wording to usable vs. formatted space, I was using the two interchangeably. The GiB/GB conversion is what gives us the spare area.Take care,
Anand
suprem1ty - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
It's not a bug. Just a different way of looking at digital capacity.suprem1ty - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Oh wait sorry I see what you mean now. Disregard previous postflyingpants1 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
I think I might know what his problem is.When people see their 1TB-labelled drive displays only 931GB in Windows, they assume it's because formatting a drive with NTFS magically causes it to lose 8% of space, which is totally false. Here's a short explanation for newbie readers. A gigabyte (GB) as displayed in Windows is actually a gibibyte (GiB).
1 gibibyte = 1073741824 bytes = 1024 mebibytes
1 gigabyte = 1000000000 bytes = 1000 megabytes = 0.931 gibibytes
1000 gigabytes = 931 gibibytes
Windows says GB but actually means GiB.
SSDs and HDDs are labelled differently in terms of space. Let's say they made a spinning hard disk with exactly 256GB (238GiB) of space. It would appear as 238GB in Windows, even after formatting. You didn't lose anything,
because the other 18 gigs was never there in the first place.
Now, according to Anandtech, a 256GB-labelled SSD actually *HAS* the full 256GiB (275GB) of flash memory. But you lose 8% of flash for provisioning, so you end up with around 238GiB (255GB) anyway. It displays as 238GB in Windows.
If the SSDs really had 256GB (238GiB) of space as labelled, you'd subtract your 8% and get 235GB (219GiB) which displays as 219GB in Windows.
flyingpants1 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
IMO drive manufacturers should stop messing around and put 256GiB of USABLE space on each 256GiB drive, and start marking them as such.Holly - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Tbh imho using base 10 units in binary environment is just asking for a facepalm. Everything underneath runs on 2^n anyway and this new "GB" vs "GiB" is just a commercial bullshit so storage devices can be sold with flashier stickers. Your average raid controller bios will show 1TB drive as 931GB one as well (at least few ICHxR and one server Adaptec I have access to right now all do).