OCZ Vertex 2 Pro, Sandforce Powered SSD Preview
Test System and IOMeter
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our Vantage benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 965 Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 Integrated on board Western Digital Raptor - OS OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB OCZ Vertex 120GB Intel X25-M Gen 1 80GB Intel X25-M Gen 2 160GB |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Window 7 Ultimate 64-bit Intel 9.1.0.1012 DirectX 10 NVIDIA ForceWare v195.62 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 ATTO ver 2.34 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra XII SP2 IOMeter 2008 CrystalDiskMark |
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The IOMeter Question:
As we noted in a previous SSD round-up article, though IOMeter is clearly thought of as a well respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a gauge for relative available bandwidth with a given storage solution.
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.
Its surprising to see where the Vertex 2 Pro dropped in, in comparison to our reference drives. In this benchmark, it falls in the middle of the pack and is outpaced by both of the Intel SSDs. Also, the average response time of the Vertex 2 Pro trails every other drive in this comparison. However, if you look at the bandwidth numbers, the Vertex 2 Pro drive is about on par with Intel's first gen X25-M SSD. Also, what you'll see in the pages ahead is that this performance profile shake out the same under more real-world test conditions.
