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.
