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 - Light
The Light trace is designed to be an accurate illustration of basic usage. It's basically a subset of the Heavy trace, but we've left out some workloads to reduce the writes and make it more read intensive in general.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - Specs | ||||||||||||
| Reads | 372,630 | |||||||||||
| Writes | 459,709 | |||||||||||
| Total IO Operations | 832,339 | |||||||||||
| Total GB Read | 17.97 GB | |||||||||||
| Total GB Written | 23.25 GB | |||||||||||
| Average Queue Depth | ~4.6 | |||||||||||
| Focus | Basic, light IO usage | |||||||||||
The Light trace still has more writes than reads, but a very light workload would be even more read-centric (think web browsing, document editing, etc). It has about 23GB of writes, which would account for roughly two or three days of average usage (i.e. 7-11GB per day).
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - IO Breakdown | |||||||||||
| IO Size | <4KB | 4KB | 8KB | 16KB | 32KB | 64KB | 128KB | ||||
| % of Total | 6.2% | 27.6% | 2.4% | 8.0% | 6.5% | 4.8% | 26.4% | ||||
The IO distribution of the Light trace is very similar to the Heavy trace with slightly more IOs being 128KB. About 70% of the IOs are sequential, though, so that is a major difference compared to the Heavy trace.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - QD Breakdown | ||||||||||||
| Queue Depth | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4-5 | 6-10 | 11-20 | 21-32 | >32 | ||||
| % of Total | 73.4% | 16.8% | 2.6% | 2.3% | 3.1% | 1.5% | 0.2% | 0.2% | ||||
Over 90% of the IOs have a queue depth of one or two, which further proves the importance of low queue depth performance.
The Barefoot 3's focus has always been sustained rather than peak performance and that's visible in our Light trace. It's not slow by any means since most drives are within a 10% margin (excluding the 850 Pro and Neutron XT), though.
The same applies to latency where most drives are essentially on par with each other.
While the 850 Pro does very well when it comes to performance, it's also the most power hungry, whereas the Vector 180 at smaller capacities is again easily the most power efficient drive.
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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?