OCZ Core Series SSD Vs VelociRaptor, Sneak Peek!
There has obviously been a fair amount of buzz going on in the market about SSDs (Solid State Disks) as of late, as pricing continues its downward trend. In addition performance has continued to improve with SSDs as the technology matures. Recently, announcements from major OEMs like Samsung have promised fairly impressive offerings with read/write performance that would rival most standard spinning disks and of course sub 1ms access times that literally no standard rotational media could come close to.
In preparation for an SSD round-up here at HotHardware, we started getting in eval samples from various vendors and one of them perhaps has made a bit more of a splash than others recently, with it's $239 after rebate price tag (64GB model, 128GB is $399 - $449) and specified 120 - 140MB/sec read - 80 - 93MB/sec write performance. So we decided to give you all a quick-take look at it before we dig into the pile of SSDs we have here in the lab...
The OCZ Core Series SATA II 64GB Solid State Drive is here on the test bench and we pitted it against some stiff competition.
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OCZ 64GB Core SSD WD VelociRaptor
We've seen some oddities with SSD drives in our standard HD Tach testing, so we're going to look deeper into that and experiment with different SATA controllers. Our testing was done on an Intel X48 chipset board (Asus P5E3 Premium) with the ICH9R Southbridge.
We then decided to run the new OCZ drive through some basic application testing with PCMark Vantage. Here are the results...
OCZ Core SSD - 64G SATA - 9856 PCMark Vantage HDD Score
WD VelociRaptor - 300G SATA - 3690 PCMark Vantage HDD Score
Here we see the OCZ Core drive mop the floor with the VelociRaptor, largely due to lighting fast random access times we suspect, as well as its strong read performance. The only test that doesn't bode as well for the SSD drive is the Windows Media Center test, where the VelociRaptor outpaces the SSD by 20% or so.
Though SSDs are not even close to price parity with standard hard drives just yet, there's no question the SSD is going to be the storage media of the future. We'll have a much more detailed look at the current state of Solid State Disk technology, coming in the weeks ahead.
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Via: HotHardware | News Archive
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e series,
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Comments
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i dont think ssd will be "the" storage media of the future due to smaller capacity, but i forsee people having a ssd drive for o/s, applications. and having a normal hard drive for storage music, movies, etc.... (files where bandwidth wont matter). |
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I can't wait to see the full-blown SSD round-up! |
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Once I see some reasonably priced SSDs in the 200-250 gb range is when i will get one. |
It's not as if that won't change in time. |
ice_73:|
well recover, i dont think ti will change in the next 5-10 years. people want at least 500gb on a ssd as a substitute to hard drives. so for the future i dont see hard drives going away. |
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Ice, I think you're right, at least in the short term. Think 12 months or so here... Silicon technology advances significantly faster than hard disk technology, though it will be sometime before cost/density parity are reached. I'll go out on a limb here though (maybe not so much) and say that this time next year, you'll all be jonesing for a fast, high density SSD in your rig. It will be boutique at first, then it will likely take off like wildfire. |
maybe your right, but i dont think it will only take a year, i think in about 2-3 years ssd disks will be affordable enough so that alot of people can use them and in about 5 years, hard drives will be phased out (like floppy drives ) i admit, i spent about 120 on my 74gb raptor so i dont really care about storage too much. but i have friends who are not the best in computers and all they look at is ghz, amount of ram, and amount of hard drive space. in order for companies like dell, hp, conpaq to get ssd as their main storage config they gotta be really cheap and store a decent amount. i do not see this happening in under 5 years. |
Says who? Not everyone runs big hard drives and by big I mean anything over a couple hundred gigs. IMO SSDs will become mainstream sometime in 2010. |
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Can a quantitative test be performed with MS Flight Sim X? |
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Imagine having a Silent Raid system. How awesome is that. If you say run raid 5 with a bunch of hard disks your pc or server sounds like a 747 taking off. However with SSD, youl be like "is my computer on ?" heh |
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Yeah SSD's aren't there yet but there's a few things on the horizon some near some far in the storage market. I was reading about IBM's Nanotube HD's today it in research figures far outperforms either SCSI IDE Sata and SSD but is roughly 7 years off. Either way we've been at current HD status quo for how many years now? Lol and everything else hardware wise gets an upgrade every 6 months or yearly at least. |
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Ice_73, your argument is lacking, Dave is refering to the future of the IT industry, not the present HDD market. In the near future the SSD's will feature in performance systems as the carrier of OS and Applications (8 Second vista startup anyone?) and yes, silent rigs. SSD Technology at the present still needs working on, I agree with Dave however, That in the 'future' once these adjustments have been made, SSD technology WILL ultimately outpace any physical disk - and with inclusions of better interfaces and chipsets become the next generation of storage, Business or otherwise. Trust us on this one, when you're running 40TB of storage on SSD drives that run faster, cheaper (electricity wise) and more reliably then those darn SCSI drives (that are often replaced) you will be able to supply a more environmentally and technologically stable solution - that's where the money is at. Not to mention the portability options for Laptop users. |
ugh, thats what i said. that most people will use ssd and a hard drive. ssd for boot and applications and hard drive for music, video etc... of course in a few years ssd will be the only thing in hard drives, but that will take imo about 5 years. |
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You're all noobs, SSD technology doesn't need working on. Samsung are due to release their 250gb SSD drive in the next few months and it is even faster than the OCZ drives, people are speculating that the price point will be around $250 so OCZ have got these babies to market double quick so they are able to sell them for these prices for a few months before Samsung come along and demolish the competition :P |
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Let the good times roll indeed, Harold. Welcome to the HH community as well. :) |
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I am curious how this is going to effect hard drive companies. Samsung makes most of the worlds memory chips from my understanding so I am curious of how this supply-demand is gona work unless these other companies start manufacturing their own memory chips. |
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I'm not sure what the actual numbers are but I do know their are plenty of other vendors out there that Samsung won't have any kind of monopoly.
Another good question is what, if any, effect this will have on the DRAM market. |
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I once read about some negatives of SSDs, and I don't hear much about them when people start talking about the performance gains. Those negatives were 1) a limited # of, or finite, read/writes and 2) performance slowly (granted, it's probably VERY slowly) diminishes over time. |
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It is a myth that SSD's have short lifespans due to limited read/writes. SSD's have very long lifetimes. With wear-leveling they are easily longer lived than normal HDD's. |
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I wonder if they can add some kind of high speed cache to speed up write times. Kind of like the way enterprise store companies like EMC address write latency. Unless of course they are already doing this. :) |
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I didn't say short lifespan; I said "a limited # of, or finite, read/writes," which even if it's really high (I saw some numbers once but can't recall them), what happens when that # is reached? Does the SSD no longer respond or is performance just diminished? |
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I too have heard or read this somewhere. Was this question answered or adressed? |
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I really want this as a start up hard drive. I thought 64 GB was low but then i compared to my 20 gbs and this drive should do fine. |
Same here. But I'd use it with a standard HD in RAID1. I don't trust the manufacturers and their claims about reliability, this is not a graphics card that can be replaced and life goes on |
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The Velociraptor values are a tad low, did you use IDE? Mine with AHCI and the WD 640GB Western Digital 6400AAKS 640GB: 5086 HDD - Windows Defender 22.26 HDD - gaming 15.27 HDD - importing pictures to Windows Photo Gallery 50.72 HDD - Windows Vista startup 20.68 HDD - video editing using Windows Movie Maker 52.04 HDD - Windows Media Center 89.89 HDD - adding music to Windows Media Player 10.72 HDD - application loading 5.56 30% faster, twice the performance on Movie Maker. Other reviews show much higher values too :/ Your Velociraptor review also shows higher values: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Western_Digital_Velociraptor_300GB/?page=6 |
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"I didn't say short lifespan; I said "a limited # of, or finite, read/writes," which even if it's really high (I saw some numbers once but can't recall them), what happens when that # is reached? Does the SSD no longer respond or is performance just diminished?" |
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http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106 |
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In response to shane about the limited write cycles in the life of an SSD. There is very limited (very) of spare sectors, like on any drive, but the total # of write cycles is Faaaaaaaaar lower than a standard HDD. Right now its no big deal because most solid state apps are low rewrite intensity (think cameras, mp3 players's etc), but working at a very large company, I know we couldn't reasonably switch to SSD regardless of cost-> Any random drive in our array performs 10s of MILLIONs of writes per day-> we have .txt day logs from single servers that are over a gig in size, with millions of individual entries. This would annihilate the lifespan of an SSD. Maybe when a little more progress is made on this subtle gremlin it could be a viable alternative, but as it stands, not quite. |
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in what blocksize is the OCZ disk formatted, because i have 2 of them in raid, but with the same benchmark (ATTO) and the same values i get different readings then publiched here. i only get a little over 100 mbs/sec read and write. one differences is that i have the V2 version, which have a read of 170 mb/sec. as said, the are in raid 0 stripe. i expected readings of 300 - 340 but it wil not happen. can someone tel me what the differences is between a test, like above and the same test at my home? regardless, my vista startup time is droped from 1 minute 10 seconds to 40 seconds, so i'am still very pleased :-) |
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