Model | OCZ Vertex 4 256 Gigabyte |
Capacity | 512 Gigabyte |
Memory | Synchronous NAND Flash |
Technology | Intel 29 F16B08CCME3 |
Throughput | up to
535 MB/s reading, up to 380 MB/s writing
up to 90'000 IOPS write up to 85'000 IOPS read |
Accesstime (read) | < 0.1 ms |
Acoustics | no noise |
Warranty | 5 Years |
Some readers might have noticed, that OCZ now provides a five year warranty plan with the Vertex 4. For the Vertex 3 and almost all other drives that are available at this time warranty is limited to three years. The reason for this can be found in the so called Ndurance 2.0 Technology, which is an umbrella term of which for example reduced write amplification is part of. At this point OCZ emphasizes that they achieved this without the use of any compression algorithms and therefore there will be no performance drops. Furhtermore there is also support for Advanced Multi-Level ECC, Adaptive NAND Flash Management, Redundant NAND Array Technology and 256 bit AES encryption.
Models tested | ||
Testenvironment |
||
Motherboard | ASUS P8P67 Deluxe B3 | |
Chipset | Intel P67 | 1'333 MHz |
CPU | Intel Core i7 2600k | 3.4 GHz |
Memory | Kingston HyperX 2133 | 4 GByte |
Graphics card | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 285 | |
Storage (system) | Seagate Barracuda | 640 GByte |
Operating systems | Ubuntu - most recent Kernel version Windows 7 64 Bit with caching drives |
|
Filesystem | XFS |
We think everybody reading this article can imagine the following scenario: You just bought a hard drive which according the specs sheet should transfer 120 MByte/s reading and writing. In the reviews you read about astonishing 110 MByte/s but after you put the drive into you system it feels much slower. The whole story gets even worse when you start a benchmark which does randomread/write of 4 KByte blocks. There you only get two to three MBytes/s.
Because of this we don't want to publish screenshots of standard programs like HD-Tach, HD-Tune, ... we want our tests to be
... sind.
We test with activated caches and NCQ (Native Command Queueing) because they're also activated under daily use. But the data size tested is always at least twice the amount of the memory. In this there will be no intereference.
We noticed that the measuring error is constantly within ±2%. Therefore we mention it only here.
Additionally we evaluate the S.M.A.R.T. data to assess if there are already errors.
The following table give you a brief overview to which points we turn our centre of attention.
Test | Observations |
Sequential Read/Write Tests |
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Random Read/Write Tests |
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iozone3 is a benchmark suit for storage solutions which natively runs under Linux.
Therefore we are testing the throughput with different block sizes using the following commands:
It is important to reproduce scenarios of daily usage. Certain parameters need to be variable during the test to make a statement about the product. In our test the parameters are the different block sizes. It defines the size in KBytes which is written/read on the drive during a transaction.
With this method one can test the reading and writing of either small and big files. In a normal personal computer environment you usually don't find many files smaller than 16 KByte. The relative amount of small files is much bigger on a mail or database server. Therefore tests with small block sizes are of interest for database-based applications.
In bigger RAID arrays the hard disk cache is usually disabled and the RAID-Controller takes over the job of caching. Exactly in such setups hard drives need to be very fast when reading or writing small amounts of data. Sequential throughput isn't interesting in this case.
Announcement:
Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many
objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a
rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time
whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or
understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well
as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in
time obsolete.
With the Vertex 4, OCZ has an SSD in its portfolio that comes with synchronous
NAND Flash and a good price/performance ratio. Astonishingly high, that's what
the 4k random IOPS are. At the end of the day
you get 83'000 IOPS when doing 4k reads and 81'000 IOPS when performing 4k
writes. Therefore the Vertex 4 is a really fast drive when it comes to every day
usage, because the random writes do have a highly significant influence on how
fast a drive feels.
A closer look at the sequential thoughput rates reveals that therer is robust performance level especially at higher block sizes. Regarding sequential reads we see Atto values which top out at 482 Megabyte per second for read performance. Concerning sequential writes the manages to reach 375 Megabyte per seconds. If you keep in mind, that the new Indilinx controller doens't care about compression it is also possible to move big files at very high transfer speeds.
If we furthermore look at the throughput rates at 16k, 32k, 64k and 128k block size we see that the drive struggles a bit. Generally it looks like OCZ has optimized the new Indilinx controller as well as the firmware for high 4k IOPS and high sequentials with big bock sizes.
The recommended price for this 256 Gigabyte model is 349 US-Dollar. Therefore also the price point is on a competitive level. Last but not least there are five years warranty, which is two years more then almost any other manufacturer offers.
The OCZ Vertex 4 with 256 Gigabyte receives very good five out of five
stars.