OCZ Vertex 460 (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 22, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Indilinx
- Vertex 460
Random Read/Write Speed
The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.
In random read/write tests the Vertex 460 and Vector 150 trade punches but the differences are minor. Our Vector 150 sample was tested a few months back so minor differences in firmware could account for the increased random read/write results, or it may simply be margin of error.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
Same goes for sequential performance: the Vertex 460 and Vector 150 perform more or less equally.
Sequential performance gives the Vector 150 a slight edge in both read and write results, but the difference is only a few percent at most.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Read/Write Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
Hrel - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
Seems to me Mushkin is the SSD to get right now. Only one rated at 2Million MTBF that I've seen as well as having very high sequential and random IOPS.dcollins - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
Sorry, I don't take chances with storage. Samsung SSDs can't be beaten right now, and have proven rock solid over the last year. My family has 5 in total and most of my teammates at work have 500GB drives. Zero problems, great performance. Going with OCZ just seems needlessly risky.blanarahul - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
And that sums up the review. Samsung is like the Goku of SSDs. Try hard as you might. You can't beat them in long term.LB-ID - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
They have new corporate overlords, but it's still the same OCZ. That's really all I needed to know. I simply cannot trust the people at OCZ for any of the things I care about in a product: reliability, accountability, and service.ezridah - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
The Newegg prices are different for the 2 lower capacity drives today. They are now $120 for the 120GB and $140 for the 240GB. Not a bad price for the 240GB drive. An extra $20 for double the storage is a no-brainer.Bob Todd - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
They've also got the 240GB Crucial M500 for $130 right now...BlakKW - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
"By doing additional validation, OCZ is able to pick the highest endurance parts and use them..."I don't understand this and it makes me curious: how can NAND be tested for endurance, and then used in an SSD? It seems to me that any extensive testing would use up a significant portion of the NAND's finite lifespan?
And if testing the identical parts, how does a test differentiate good vs bad when it comes to endurance?
TY
lmcd - Friday, January 24, 2014 - link
I'm sure the endurance testing doesn't come from simply wearing it out and testing. There may be some extrapolation methods or some different tools altogether.LordConrad - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
I have never had any issues with OCZ SSDs. I think this Vertex 460 looks like a decent drive, although I would go for the Vector due to the longer warranty.chris81 - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
Typo: 4KB Random Read is written twice in the first table. The second one should be Random Write