This puts me in an awkward position: the other day I had a discussion with the editor of Atomic magazine, not that I know him (things don’t work that way here at on3 – I was arguably just trolling their forums). The point of discussion was a whether a banal factual review was better than a Gonzo or ‘hippie reporting feelings about stuff on acid’ review. I adopted the ‘analytical > all’ position.... and yet this 2.5” sliver of silicon is making me think I got it all wrong. What makes a good SSD worth the entry fee is, as it turns out, feeling. Now you can’t communicate feeling electronically, no matter how many emoticons your forum offers, so in lieu I’ve settled on the next best thing: producing a set of videos. The first is from a very fast traditional drive (the WD Black 640GB), the second from the Vertex 2 – each loading an identical set of 10 programs simultaneously:
What stands out here is just how much faster the Vertex 2 moves: Windows starts in half the time, whilst programs take 25%-50% as long to load as with a traditional hard drive - it’s also all done in complete silence (SSDs are composed of memory chips, with no moving parts). It’s a genuinely bizarre experience, a bit like driving a Mercedes-McLaren. I’ll come back to just how fast OCZ’s new supercar offering is compared to the competition shortly, but first a look at the ‘why’ of Solid State Drives as a whole.
Turntables 101Waaay back in the day the PC was many things – most notably at that point, they were slow and beige. However in a strange way, the dinosaur of old was also lightning fast – loading a program often took under a second and the OS but a few seconds. This stemmed not so much from the hardware itself as that the average program was perhaps 4 Megabytes. If we fast forward 20 years CPU speeds move from 100 MHz to 4 GHz and memory from 64 MB to 4 GB, but programs increase from 4 Megabytes to 4 Gigabytes in size. That’s the kicker, whilst everything else in your PC is exponentially quicker the hard disk is maybe only four times as fast as it was in the 90’s, yet it now loads a thousand times as much data. The mechanical drive is designed like a turntable, and thus has to access a specific place to get to data - this vinyl-age hardware thus spends half its time locating information, not actually loading it. As a bonus kick in the teeth, a hard drive will generally move data around no faster than 90 MB a second and for a 4GB program that’s slow. The upshot is that however fast the processor and however your OS tries to hide it, the HDD is the bottleneck on every computer built today.
Enter the SSDThis was an obvious problem and thankfully there was an obvious solution - putting data onto memory chips. Silicon didn’t need to rotate and so didn’t take forever to find a file; in theory it could also read and write data much faster than a hard drive ever could. As is often the case though, initial models were disappointing from a variety of perspectives, amongst them the ruinous expense. The price was a direct result of expensive memory, whilst the often low and inconsistent performance came from untested hardware controlling that memory - early drives generally ‘stuttered’ - causing programs to lockup for a few seconds.
It wasn’t until Intel released their X-25M drives that the situation changed significantly. Half the puzzle was solved and Intel finally brought us an SSD that could free the masses from mechanical drives, assuming the masses all had $NZ 1000 to spend on an 80 GB drive - monopoly is such a beautiful thing, no? As a result of Intel being, quite frankly dicks about their pricing, the great masses still weren’t able to get their (largely unwashed admittedly) paws on an SSD. The water finally broke on the SSD revolution in early 2009 - it falling to a memory company to bring the first non-Intel performance offering to market and with it, real competition. Equipped with the Indilix ‘Barefoot’ controller, OCZ’s original Vertex galloped heroically into action like Mel Gibson in Braveheart (only with less racism and likely a lot more respect for historical accuracy), and within a few months OCZ had everything tweaked right. The original Vertex was at this point close to an Intel SSD in terms of speed, it also never stuttered - running just as flawlessly as Intel’s offerings. As a result prices fell (you can now buy an advanced 80GB Intel drive for a third the price you could in 2008) and a trickle of identical SSD’s using the Barefoot controller burrowed their way out of clean-rooms and into performance PC’s everywhere.
The drive we have on review today is the successor to the original Vertex – the imaginatively named Vertex 2. Slight ribbing aside I can see why OCZ reused the name – within the SSD world the ‘Vertex’ carries a lot of cultural cache – this drive has a lot to live up to. It’s 50GB capacity is designed to take Windows and a few important programs , with a traditional hard drive for storage and the rest. Hardware wise the $NZ 330 Vertex 2 and its slightly slower $NZ 300 Agility 2 cousin pack the shinily new Sandforce SF-1200 controller chip. I could go on (and on and on) about the technical trickery in this controller but at the end of the day the proof of the pudding is not in the details, but in the speed of consumption – and this is a lot faster than the original Vertex. It’s faster even than the newest Intel X25M, hell it’s faster in most cases than the $NZ800-for-32GB, SRS-business server-grade Intel X25E. Now don your nerd hats folks, I’m about to specify exactly how fast that is!
Test System & MethodologyIntel Core i7 860 @ 4.0 GHz
2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 CL8-8-8-24 1T
MSI P55-GD65
Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 @ 9000/5200
Corsair HX-620
All drives were connected via the onboard Intel ICH10R controller, in AHCI mode for the Vertex 2 and IDE mode for the WD Black. A fresh build of Windows 7 Professional was made onto the Vertex 2, drivers and programs were installed and TRIM confirmed as being enabled using Intels SSD Toolbox. This installation was then ‘imaged’ onto the WD Black using Seagate Seatools, and a defrag performed on the WD Black. All timed tests were run ten times each, with the average (mean) value being reported. HD TACH, IOMeter and YouTube demonstrations were each run five times, with the most representative test shown. As a side note, a look through other reviews shows that HDTACH ‘Sequential Read Speeds’ for the Vertex 2 are divided into two categories: ~190 MB/s and ~220 MB/s, of which this review fits into the former. Testing on another ICH10R as well as an ICH9 controller showed no change in speeds – however the consistency in IOMeter and other tests between reviews suggests that this may is an issue with HDTach, not the drive.
HDTach 3.0.4.0 - 32mb (long zones) Sequential Test:IOMeter (2006-07-27 Build) Test:These are synthetic benchmarks, but unlike graphics card synthetics they’re pretty much on the mark. Both IOMeter and HDTach drive down into something called ‘Kernel Mode’, essentially an attempt to bypass the operating system and connect directly with the drive itself to determine its true performance. The results show the Vertex 2 to not only be much faster than the WD Black, but the fastest consumer SSD there is today bar none. One of these will grow your epenis exponentially – this is a scientifically verified fact. In keeping however with our new age desire to also talk about feelings over a cup of fair-trade ‘chai’ and an ethnic quiche, it’s just as important to boil this down to what happens when you use the drive in real life:
General System Performance Test:Again, these numbers are as good as they come, at an average of 20% faster than the Intel X25M G2 – this is indeed the new performance king - as such the Vertex 2 represents a watershed for the market. The blazing speed is primarily a result of the Vertex 2’s low latency (how long it takes to find data) – that being less than a hundredth that of the WD Black, this combined with moving data at two or more times the speed truly results in a gulf in capabilities between the two. To put all this into relief, if you were to compare a RAID 0 array of six Western Digital Velociraptors using the “Real Life Program Load Times” table above, not one of the benchmarks would come out in favour of the Velociraptors – in fact most would show times pretty close to the WD Black. This reiterates that latency, the ‘time taken to find the data in the first place’ is what SSD’s are all about.
Further Testing – Idle Garbage Collection (no seriously) and an Achillies ToeOne of the less well known factors affecting the Solid State Drive is that performance on an SSD will degrade hugely. There are two methods employed to prevent this, the first being Windows 7’s TRIM capability, which engages automatically on all compatible SSDs (the Vertex 2 being one). However for those using RAID or any other OS, TRIM is unavailable - you’ll then need to rely on the drives own ‘Idle Garbage Collection’. The latter option is of variable quality, depending on the Controller and Firmware. Performance testing with an install of Windows XP and ‘junk data’ showed the Vertex 2 to be possibly the most resilient SSD there is to performance degradation over time – if you’re planning on using RAID or an older OS, this is the drive you want.
In fact the Vertex 2 has only one quite minor caveat attached to it – the Sandforce controller compresses data during transfer to speed things up. As a result, if you’re one of the 0.01% of people whose workload consists primarily of compressed data (for SQL bunnies it might) this drive will be slower than an Intel. For everyone else the Vertex 2 remains the faster option.
The Lay of the SSD Landscape in Mid 2010The only true competitor to this drive is the Crucial C300, at least until the October–December releases of the new Indilix controller and G3 Intel drives. A current Intel drive will give performance not all that far from OCZs and they aren’t a bad choice, however as the Vertex 2s cost essentially the same per GB of storage, it’s clear choice you should chose. In contrast, the Crucial C300 is a SATA III drive, and can stand toe-to-toe on performance with the Vertex 2 if you have SATA III. Should the C300 ever reach NZ in volume and with good pricing it would become a true alternative in price/performance, however at present mark-ups are just too big for it to be competitive. Similarly, whilst there are other drives shipping in NZ with the Sandforce controller (A-Data & Corsair) the OCZ drive is both the fastest, the mostly widely available and... the cheapest. Not really such a bad combo that....
On price then, the Vertex 2 stands up to the competition. All models also come with a three year warranty, a 2.5” to 3.5” converter (SSDs are generally laptop drive sized) and OCZ’s best in class firmware updates. Also note that a 50GB Vertex 2 or Agility 2 drive can similarly be upgraded to 60GB by updating their firmware to v1.10 - 100GB (~$NZ630) and ($1,100) 200GB models can be upgraded to 120GB and 240GB respectively. This still leaves us with an expensive component, but building a good PC is all about balance; ensuring there are no weak links or bottlenecks and as mentioned above, every pc is bottlenecked by its storage system. I truly don’t believe any PC above $NZ 2000 is being built correctly without an SSD.
Conclusion200+ GB SSDs are still luxury items, able to genuinely replace system drives and intended for those looking to build extreme rigs, but ‘boot drive’ models are priced within the means of most, allowing us to ‘buy into’ the performance an SSD offers without spending an arm and a leg. In fact, in real life these allow you to spend the majority of your time solely using the SSD – and for both high cost, large capacity drives and the more affordable ‘boot’ drives, we have a new performance king.
My feeling then, is that this something of a strange and difficult first review to write; the Vertex 2 is a genuinely unique product; you should have an SSD, it should be a drive with a Sandforce controller and (in NZ at least) that drive should be an OCZ Vertex 2. In the end it all comes down to the experience – once you’ve used a good SSD it really is difficult to go back. Now if work would just pay me my damn bonus....
Many thanks to Playtech for providing the review sample.
