Some amount of wheeling and dealing got OCZ access to special firmware for its last-gen SandForce drives, enabling faster random-write performance than the competition. Despite OCZ’s recent acquisition of Indilinx, it seems there’s still a spark to OCZ’s relationship with SandForce, as the company was able to get us an SF-2200 drive before anyone else. Since the Vertex 3 is the first SF-2200–powered SSD we’ve tested, we don’t know how it compares to the rest of the SF-2200 field, but we do know it kicks the pants off of most every other SSD we’ve reviewed.
OCZ retains the solid-state crown with stellar overall performance.
The Vertex 3 uses 25nm-process NAND and, like all SandForce drives, no cache. That SF-2200 controller really cooks, setting records in most of our benchmarks and performing competitively in the rest. No single drive in our roundup matches the Vertex 3 on all fronts, though the Crucial m4 is close in random read/write performance and the Intel 510 comes close to its sequential reads and surpasses its sequential writes. OCZ continues its tradition of blazing-fast random-write performance, both at low- and high-queue depths, serving up more than 85,000 IOPS in our Iometer QD32 4KB random-write test. That’s nearly 80 percent faster than the Vertex 2, the previous SATA champion.
It’s too early to tell whether the rest of the SF-2200 lineup will be able to compete with OCZ’s Vertex 3. But for the few weeks until we get our hands on more next-gen SandForce drives, the Vertex 3 reigns supreme.
$540, www.ocztechnology.com
Blazing-fast performance on all fronts.
Sequential-write speeds slightly behind Intel 510.
| OCZ Vertex 3 | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 240GB |
| Controller | SF-2200 |
| CrystalDiskMark | |
| Sustained Read (MB/s) | 485.5 |
| Sustained Write (MB/s) | 289.8 |
| 4KB Read, 32QD (MB/s) | 171.2 |
| 4KB Write, 32QD (MB/s) | 247.4 |
| AS SSD | |
| Seq. Read (MB/s) | 506.2 |
| Seq. Write (MB/s) | 280.19 |
| 4KB Read (IOPS) | 5,539 |
| 4KB Write (IOPS) | 14,263 |
| Read Access (ms) | 0.157 |
| Write Access (ms) | 0.222 |
| ATTO | |
| 64KB File Read (MB/s) | 446.5 |
| 64KB File Write (MB/s) | 505.3 |
| IOMETER | |
| 4KB Random Write | 85,144.43 |
| Max Access Time (ms) | 61 |
| Premiere Pro Encode Write (sec) | 422 |
| PCMark Vantage x64 HDD | 59,978 |
Our current test bed is a 3.1GHz Core i3-2100 processor on an Asus P8 P67 Pro (B3 chipset) running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests used onboard 6Gb/s SATA ports with latest Intel drivers, except 3Gb/s SATA tests, which used onboard 3Gb/s Intel SATA ports.
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