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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sfc - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Fool me once, shame on, shame on me. A fool me can't get fooled again.I *KNEW* OCZ was a garbage company after all the havoc they caused in the late 90s/early 00s with their crap memory products. It sounded alarm bells in my head that reminded me of their fake address that was literally an empty storefront.
But I read all the press, heard how it was just the same name but a different backing company. So I bought one of their SSDs like a fool, only to send it back multiple times and everytime have it die again. I still have an 80GB intel SSD I bought several years before the OCZ that's still kicking.
After all that, I find out the same crook selling crap memory was behind the "new" OCZ. Pulling his same parlor tricks giving review sites hand-picked models and sending bottom barrel reject flash to customers. You should just refuse to review any more of their hardware, they're crooks and their wares are trash.
Jahzah_1 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Just picked up a Samsung 850 Evo for $204 at Microcenter (price matched to Newegg), last Saturday. Don't understand the justification by OCZ to price the 480GB version at $275.Jahzah_1 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
That is $204 for the 500GB Evo.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
As I understand the intent of this product, it's aimed at the likes of the Extreme Proand 850 Pro. The Arc 100 is the mainstream competitor to the EVO, which is $196
on newegg for the 480GB.
Ian.
Jahzah_1 - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
oh, I see. What I didn't take into account was the fairly inexpensive nature of 3D-Nand production. So Samsung has an edge it seems, to set their mid-range drives at that price.rocketman122 - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
Ive had nothing but bad experience with OCZ. I had mem go bad, rma and sold them. I had the core 64 SSD that the company knew were problematic and still didnt have integrity to not sell them. that core SSD cost me quite chunk of money and I suffered with that. I never forI hope they go out of business and stop selling their gear to the public. we need companies with reliable gear.
ocztosh - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
Hello rocketman122, thank you for your comments and sorry to hear that you had issues with the Core Series. The old company no longer exists and the IP was purchased by Toshiba. As OCZ Storage Solutions - A Toshiba Group Company we have completely redone our products and processes and there has been a great focus on quality throughout the organization. Everything from the product design cycle through manufacturing has been updated. By implementing our own in-house controller and firmware technology and having access to premium Toshiba NAND we are now able to impact this better than ever. We believe we have a very competitive offering today when it comes to reliability and product quality and hope that we will have the opportunity to prove it to you in the future. Thank you again for your previous business.loimlo - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
Good SSD review as usual. Kudos to Kristian's efforts.Btw, I wonder the M-I-A BX100 review. Can we expect it ?
Kristian Vättö - Friday, March 27, 2015 - link
It's coming. This month has been full of NDAs, which have postponed the BX100 review, but once I'm done with next week's NDAs the BX100 will be getting my full attention :)loimlo - Saturday, March 28, 2015 - link
Thanks for clarification. Take your time to do it ~~