The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
OCZ Sends Me SSDs, Once More
As I mentioned before, after the X25-M article I was somewhat blacklisted from getting more SSDs to test. Since the Core V2, I hadn’t tested a single SSD from OCZ or anyone else for that matter. Everything on the market was either based on Samsung’s SLC drive, JMicron MLC or the Intel X25 series.
Needless to say, I was excited when I got a box from OCZ.
I got the drives early in the morning. Excited, I opened them up. Inside the box were three drives. The OCZ Apex (I’d never reviewed it, and OCZ reluctantly sent another JMicron drive to me), the Vertex and the Summit.
The Summit was based on Samsung’s latest MLC SSD controller, which I’d heard great things about. It’s supposed to compete with Intel’s drive.
The Vertex is the drive I was most interested in. A value SSD that didn’t suck, or at least that’s what it seemed to be on paper. Ryan even left me a little note on the box:
O RLY?
It’s worth noting that although other SSD makers will be making drives based on the Indilinx and Samsung controllers, OCZ was the first to get me drives based on both of these controllers. In fact, I was done testing the OCZ Summit based on Samsung’s latest controller before Samsung ever offered to ship me the drive.
I pushed the Apex and Summit drives aside for now. What I wanted to know was how the Vertex performed.
I cloned my system drive and used the Vertex in my personal machine. As soon as I hit the desktop I knew there was a problem; all of my icons took longer than they should’ve to load. It took about 30 minutes of actual usage for the drive to stutter and within a couple of hours performance got so unbearable that I had to pull it out.
Sigh, the Vertex was broken.
250 Comments
View All Comments
matrixireland - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link
hi would like to know what you pros think of the;Golden Leopard ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD? what would you add to it?
And how would you rate it against other ssd?
Specifications:
product description
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD is a high-performance design solid state drive based on the high-end micro-control IC with flash memory storage medium integrated advantaged of high speed,convenient ,aseismatic,energy-saving etc.
specification
Model
Size
Interface
Material
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD
1.8inch 70×54×6mm
ZIF
Aluminum-magnesium alloy appearance ,drawbench and colorful oxidation surface,elegant temperament
performance
read speed:80- 96Mbytes/second write speed:50- 60Mbytes/second
support ATA-7 V3 PIO/multi word/ultra DMA MODES
Low power TFBGA,4 channel of flash controller,masked ROM and data SRAM
SAMSUNG flash keeps the data faster on reliability and endurance
Dynamic and static wear-leveling prolong NAND FLASH and SSD for longer life
8/16 bit BCH ECC data error correction ability effectively guarantee the data read security.
Design consideration
Capacity
16G/32G/64G/128G/256G
Average access time
<0.25MS
operating temperature
0-85°
power consumption
DC Input Voltage(3.3V or 5 V ± 10%)Read and write:135mA/194Ma wait:70mA
shock
1500G
Application
the Laptop, pc, server,workstation,portable media player,digital collection apparatus and any computer equipment which need consecutive read and write speed and high reliability storage.
jay401 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
yeah, he wants "more expensive than" or "too expensive for".Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Second page as well:missing charts before and after this paragraph:
"The chart above shows how much faster these affordable MLC SSDs were than the fastest 3.5” hard drive in sequential transfers. But now look at random write performance:"
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
chart 1 on page 2 now shows sequential read but the paragraph is changed to mention random read ;)page 21: As far as I know, this is THE one of THE only reviews
Some very surprising benchmark results for the ocz vertex, I thought the new firmware tanked sequential read speeds (to 80-90) based on the explanation beforehand, but not according to the actual graphs.
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
third page, first table, first column: SSD and HDD entries are switchedmikaela - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
yeah great info. also great resourceSpoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
page 19: I’d never reviewed it'd & -ed?
HolyFire - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"I'd never reviewed it" is correct. "I'd" here means "I had", it's Past Perfect tense.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That should have bolded "too"FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Also, I think the velociraptor vs X-25 figures are swapped. 6 odd ms for the intel drive and 0.11ms for the velociraptor..