SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial

Name: SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial
Brand: SATA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 12:00 PM EDT

Performance Summary: Three of the drives featured here consistently offered ‘best of class’ performance throughout our testing, the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, the Corsair Force GT, and the Patriot Wildfire. Not surprisingly, all three of these drives feature the same SandForce-built controller and synchronous NAND flash memory. These drives offered the highest transfer rates in the majority of tests, and while performance does drop off as the data being used gets more incompressible, performance still remained very high overall.

That is not to say the other drives didn’t perform well. It’s quite the contrary, in fact. All of the drives we tested here offered excellent performance and would be huge upgrade over any standard hard drive. It’s just that some of the drives—namely the three we mentioned--offer higher transfer speeds in most test cases. With that said, users would be hard pressed to “feel” or a see a perceptible difference between any of these drives in typical day-to-day use. We should also point out that the Crucial M4 offered the lowest access times and most consistent performance with highly compressible or incompressible data.

So Nice, We Used This Pic Twice...

Now that we have the performance results covered, it’s time to see how all of these drives stack up in terms of price. The chart posted below lists all of the drives featured here, along with their current street price as of press time, and completely capacity details. Please note, cost per GB was calculated using actual formatted / usable capacities.

* Prices Current As Of 3PM EST, July 12, 2011

As you can see, the Crucial M4 was by far the least expensive drive looking at its cost per GB. If you want a high capacity drive and work with lots of incompressible data, the M4 is a fine choice. For all out performance, the Corsair Force GT offers a good balance; its cost per GB is lower than the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drive despite offering similar performance. For best all out performance, price be damned though, the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS and Patriot Wildfire drives are the ones to beat. They’re the most expensive, but it shows in the numbers they put up throughout our testing.

Corsair Force GT
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS
Patriot Wildfire

Crucial M4
OCZ Agility 3
Corsair Force 3 Series

Tags: SSD, OCZ, Corsair, Storage, Patriot, Agility, solid state, Crucial, vertex, SATA III, wildfire, force, M4

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com