The OCZ Vector 180 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on March 24, 2015 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Barefoot 3
- Vector 180
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy | ||||||||||||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used | ||||||||||
| Photo Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop | ||||||||||
| Gaming | Pllay games, load levels | Starcraft II, World of Warcraft | ||||||||||
| Content Creation | HTML editing | Dreamweaver | ||||||||||
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, document creation, application install, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware | ||||||||||
| Application Development | Compile Chromium | Visual Studio 2008 | ||||||||||
The Heavy trace drops virtualization from the equation and goes a bit lighter on photo editing and gaming, making it more relevant to the majority of end-users.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - Specs | ||||||||||||
| Reads | 2.17 million | |||||||||||
| Writes | 1.78 million | |||||||||||
| Total IO Operations | 3.99 million | |||||||||||
| Total GB Read | 48.63 GB | |||||||||||
| Total GB Written | 106.32 GB | |||||||||||
| Average Queue Depth | ~4.6 | |||||||||||
| Focus | Peak IO, basic GC routines | |||||||||||
The Heavy trace is actually more write-centric than The Destroyer is. A part of that is explained by the lack of virtualization because operating systems tend to be read-intensive, be that a local or virtual system. The total number of IOs is less than 10% of The Destroyer's IOs, so the Heavy trace is much easier for the drive and doesn't even overwrite the drive once.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - IO Breakdown | |||||||||||
| IO Size | <4KB | 4KB | 8KB | 16KB | 32KB | 64KB | 128KB | ||||
| % of Total | 7.8% | 29.2% | 3.5% | 10.3% | 10.8% | 4.1% | 21.7% | ||||
The Heavy trace has more focus on 16KB and 32KB IO sizes, but more than half of the IOs are still either 4KB or 128KB. About 43% of the IOs are sequential with the rest being slightly more full random than pseudo-random.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - QD Breakdown | ||||||||||||
| Queue Depth | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4-5 | 6-10 | 11-20 | 21-32 | >32 | ||||
| % of Total | 63.5% | 10.4% | 5.1% | 5.0% | 6.4% | 6.0% | 3.2% | 0.3% | ||||
In terms of queue depths the Heavy trace is even more focused on very low queue depths with three fourths happening at queue depth of one or two.
I'm reporting the same performance metrics as in The Destroyer benchmark, but I'm running the drive in both empty and full states. Some manufacturers tend to focus intensively on peak performance on an empty drive, but in reality the drive will always contain some data. Testing the drive in full state gives us valuable information whether the drive loses performance once it's filled with data.
It sure seems like Samsung is the only manufacturer that has figured out a secret recipe to boost throughput with SATA 6Gbps because all the other drives are hitting a wall at ~290MB/s.
In terms of latency the difference between all drives is much more marginal. The Vector 180 has a small advantage over the Extreme Pro at larger capacities, although once again the 850 Pro tops the charts.
The Vector 180 is also very consistent with only a small number of >10ms IOs. Oddly enough, the 240GB does better when it's full, although I think that might be just an anomaly since it practically makes no sense at all.
Similar to what we saw in The Destroyer benchmark, the 240GB and 480GB Vector 180 has wonderful load power characteristics and the difference to other drives is actually fairly significant.
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nils_ - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I distinctly remember that when I replaced a SSD in my workstation the Acronis tool, instead of copying my data from the source SSD to the new SSD copied the data to another, unrelated HDD in the system, happily overwriting the Linux partitions stored thereon... I had to unplug everything from the mainboard safe for the old and new SSD to make sure that it doesn't destroy any more of my data.MikeMurphy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Macrium Reflect is free and wonderful to use.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Yep, MR is what I use, it works very well and has a good interface.
Ian.
JonnyDough - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Thirded. It works wonderfully.The_Assimilator - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
OCZ is still beating that Barefoot 3 dead horse for all it's worth. No wonder they went bankrupt. If you don't innovate, you die.ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hello The_Assimilator. Thanks for your comments. Innovation is definitely a key area of focus for us on both the client and enterprise sides of our SSD business. We currently have a lot of resources put on next generation controllers and have been working hard on client SSDs leveraging the latest Toshiba NAND flash, which includes TLC. While some of these products are on the horizon it was natural for us to update our Vector Series with A19 NAND flash, and rather than just make a NAND change we wanted to add new features not normally found in our client class products like power fail management plus (PFM+) to further improve reliability in applications that blur the line between enthusiast and workstation.It is true that Barefoot 3 has, and continues to be, a very strong platform for us as we have shipped so many drives based on this in-house controller, and it has been so solid that we have not had to rev silicon a single time. We will continue to push to innovate when it comes to SSD performance, features and cost and are committed to delivering more value for all our customers. Thanks again for your feedback.
Minion4Hire - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
The bigger problem is that the SSD market has stagnated. When their weren't major players (like Samsung) the little guy could cobble something together and make a decent living filling what was a niche market. Now SSDs are mainstream, and through volume alone the big guys can overpower the little guys, let alone R&D, etc. Until the market shifts away from SATA there's no room for niche innovation or clever advances. It's all down to margins right now.Samus - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
You do realize the two best-selling controllers are Marvell and Sandforce, and both are older than Barefoot 3. The SF2281 is 3+ years old and still ships in a variety of Mushkin, ADATA, Intel, etc SSD's.Barefoot 3 is thoroughly modern, but it does lack some power saving and drive encryption features. I don't think it makes sense for OCZ to update it when PCIe is around the corner and will require a new controller since a bridge will be expensive and not much faster.
Aside from that, Barefoot 3 is incredibly innovative. I consider it the best controller available aside from Intel's 3rd gen controller (equally as old) and Samsung's MEX. ASMedia is still a little inconsistent and featureless, Marvell has an aging indirection table implementation that yields average performance, Phison is clearly entry-level with relatively low performance and consistency, Silicon Motion and Fusion-IO are power hungry, have quirks with certain NAND varieties and are not cost competitive.
Guspaz - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."Yeah, George, I'm not planning on getting fooled by OCZ again.
blue_urban_sky - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Is that the saying from Tennessee where they cant't remember the proper saying?