OCZ Z-Drive m84 PCI-Express SSD Review
HD Tach Testing
Simpli Software's HD Tach is described on the company's web site as such:
"HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives, flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device being tested."
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;) OCZ Z-Drive m84 256GB |
;) Intel X25-M x 2 RAID 0 |
HD Tach shows a very different picture of the Z-Drive. Here the new PCI Express-based SSD tops out with performance that is about on par with the average standard SSD, clocking in at around 200MB/sec for read and write throughput. Comparatively, a dual drive Intel SSD array sports over 500MB/sec for reads and 150MB/sec or so for writes. One thing to note is the significantly lower CPU utilization of the Z-Drive versus the Intel SSD RAID array. The obvious advantage of the Z-Drive's LSI hardware RAID controller is that even under a RAID 0 setup, it requires significantly less host CPU resources; 1% versus the ICH10R software RAID solution's 7% CPU utilization result.
