It seems like just yesterday that we said farewell to our June 2010 issue and with it our second-ever solid state drive roundup. But no sooner had we shipped that issue to the printers than a new pile of tasty solid state drives landed on our doorstep. This month, the OCZ Vertex 2 (the sequel to that “limited edition” drive from June) bumps heads with another SandForce drive—Corsair’s Force F100—as well as the Patriot Zephyr, which uses JMicron’s new JMF612 controller. The SandForce SF-1200 controller seems to be replacing Barefoot’s Indilinx as the go-to performance chipset, but what about JMicron? Its JM602 controller was largely responsible for the poor write performance of first-gen SSDs, so can the JMF612 wash that bitter taste out of our mouths? You can bet your second-favorite platypus that we’ll find out. Don’t bet your favorite platypus; that’s just irresponsible.
| BENCHMARKS | OCZ Vertex 2 | Patriot Zephyr | Corsair Force F100 | Patriot Torqx |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity | 100GB | 128GB | 100GB | 128GB |
| Controller | SandForce SF-1200 | JMicron JMF612 | SandForce SF-1200 | Indilinx |
| HDTune 4.01 | ||||
| - Avg Read (MB/s) | 228.1 |
203.6 | 196.5 | 220 |
| - Random Access Read (ms) | 0.1 |
0.1 |
0.2 | 0.1 |
| - Burst Read (MB/s) | 227.7 |
135.0 | 200.6 | 220 |
| - Avg Write (MB/s) | 223.5 |
62.9 | 221.9 | 162.3 |
| - Random Access Write (ms) | 0.1 |
0.2 | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| - Burst Write (Mb/s) | 206.3 | 142.0 | 206.3 | 221.7 |
| - 4KB Read (IOPS) | 11,145 |
5,245 | 11,102 | 7,084 |
| - 4KB Write (IOPS) | 10,025 |
1,337 | 9,778 | 3,435 |
| Premiere Pro (sec) | 363 |
431 | 373 | 364 |
| PCMark Vantage HDD | 34,050 |
23,922 | 33,393 | 23,674 |
Best scores bolded. All drives tested on our hard drive test bench: a stock-clocked Intel i7-920 CPU on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R with 6GB DDR3, running 64-bitWindows 7 Professional. All tests performed using Intel south-bridge SATA chipset with Windows 7 default AHCI drivers unless specified.
Comments are closed on this article
szore
February 12, 2011 at 3:37pm
I need it to do keyword searches on the 145 GB's worth of ebook pdf's in my library. I was going to put them all on a dedicated ssd. I now read that Crucials SSD drives have faster READ speeds, over 300gb/s. Ill have to get an sataII expansion card to take advantage of the interface, but since its running read speeds faster than the vertex, isnt that the drive I want? If anyone has experience with the Crucial drive, I would apprecite a few comments.
Thanx.
256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 2.5-inch SATA 6GB/s
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1
Fecal Face
July 22, 2010 at 8:19pm
It might just be me, but it's really hard to tell what's bolded / not bolded in pretty much every table you guys have in reviews.
roninnder
July 21, 2010 at 1:27am
It may just be my old eyes, but I don't see anything bolded in that list.
motownrider
July 19, 2010 at 6:24pm
Ok Guys and Gals,
You way 'Bolded' and then you show Red and Black backgrounds. That is not indicate 'bolded'
Print what you mean and maybe give it a Maximum PC choice award or something. Yes, you are not educators or trainers but you are publishers. This is Bolded.
Thanks for the reviews,
MTR
bbotzong
July 19, 2010 at 5:31am
Having struggled with poor performance, long boot times, slow installing upgrades from Microsoft and disappointing overall response times, I put in an SSD. All I can say is WOW! I finally am getting the performance out of my rig that just makes me say WOW. As you report, my boot from sleep is about 10 seconds. My Outlook boot is one or two seconds. My full boot is less than 30 seconds. Programs load almost instantly. No more waiting while updates install. No more waiting and cursing Microsoft. Yes, expensive, but so is the time wasted waiting for the computer to respond. The prices needs to plummet. I was not aware you could run Trim and Raid0, so I will check that out. But it you want to dramatically increase the base performance of your system, an SSD upgrade is true value added.
michaelh
July 14, 2010 at 9:23am
Many reviewers say that a good percentage of the people who read reviews are looking for justification of their choices. I've already dropped my cash, so I can't say that it's not nice to see OCZ's V2 performing so well.
Unless you're a devoted enthusiast, I wouldn't recommend them though unless you've got an aging boot drive you're looking to replace.
I've verified that my SSDs are running up to spec, have the correct features enabled and have all my apps & OS on SSD. The load times are snappy, the boot time diminished by about 15 seconds (hitting about 45) and it has ironed out some patchy framedrops in a couple of games during loading sequences. Even still, overall system performance isn't that affected. Benchmarking Crysis, for example, nets me a 1 FPS increase over HDD. It pains me to say it, but having dropped around $900 in the past month to experiment with them, in retrospect I'd probably have thrown a 980x in my system.
They're great enthusiast parts and I love having them, but I wouldn't want to try to convince someone that they're a good cash/value upgrade.
Athlonite
July 14, 2010 at 12:54am
Looks to me like the firmware that controls the controller is more important just look at the difference between the two sandforce 1200 controllers and the Indilinx isn't far behind but unfortunately the Jmicron JMF612 is just a waste of time and money and they should just stick to what they know SATA link controllers for 3rd party sata controller cards or pull finger and get their shit together
Play till it breaks then learn how to fix it!
medavid16
July 13, 2010 at 10:43pm
TRIM and RAID0 does work, google it. Latest drivers work fine, I have two Vertex 2 RAID0, the difference is night and day. ~540mb/s read over a month now, no degradation
AirPower4ever
July 14, 2010 at 5:46am
Well I googled it and this is what many are saying, but only puttinga couple for all to read.
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/600558-ssd-raid-0-use-trim.html
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=633722
http://forums.overclockersclub.com/index.php?showtopic=175055
If there is some other links stating differently, please add on. Those numbers you projected are great though.
Everything changes but change itself
Ntldr
July 14, 2010 at 7:14am
While what you looked up is true for the Indilinx firmware what he is saying he is having success with is the Sandforce firmware. Which from what I have read on it has little to no problems with raid+trim.
AirPower4ever
July 13, 2010 at 9:48pm
Overall, how are the manufacturers match up is another good topic. Does OCZ have the better product overall? Do they give good customer service? Or is it Corsair with the ones they have or does Intel SSD's take the cake. I think that would also be interesting.
Everything changes but change itself
AirPower4ever
July 13, 2010 at 9:44pm
One thing to remember is that SSD's cannot run in RAID because in Windows 7 RAID and TRIM do not function together. You can do it though. One SSD and yes, TRIM. But if you RAID two SSD's, then no TRIM and that is pretty important to have. We have to remember that SSD has a hard time with "erased" or "deleted" files. So TRIM takes care of that. Of course you can still RAID your other mechanical drives.
As far as cost, I agree, way too expensive. One could argue it is justified by the speed, but then again we heard the same thing about our homes. Oh yeah it's worth 1.5 million for that 700 sq/ft condo. It's the "location" that your spending. Ya, right freakin' criminals.
If you got money to spend then do so, but if not, just wait, new mobo's coming out with better bells and whistles and maybe they will sell an SSD to take advantage of SATA III bandwidth. And I'd rather wait for that when Intel releases ICH11R.
Everything changes but change itself
medavid16
July 13, 2010 at 10:43pm
TRIM and RAID0 does work, google it. Latest drivers work fine, I have two Vertex 2 RAID0, the difference is night and day. ~540mb/s read over a month now, no degradation
Baer
July 13, 2010 at 8:57pm
Here is a first hand report for you. I have my Vertex 2 set up as the boot and OS drive. I also have a few of my most used applications on it with the majority of my applications on my Raptor RAID 0 drive. My Vertex 2 still has 57 Gb free (it is a 100 Gb drive). From when I push the on button until Windows stable is 16 seconds. When I open Outlook to get e mail Etc it is so fast that I can not give you a number, perhaps a second.
The instalation was simple, as I am already running in RAID the AHCI setup was already in place. WIndows 7 nativly runs TRIM and the Vertex 2 is TRIM capabile. The drive comes with a 3.5" adapter so it went right into an unused drive bay. I did a clean Win 7 install which took about 15 minutes.
Yes, expensive but so worth it. This is perhaps the best upgrade, the one with the most noticeable imediate effect ever.
i7 920 DO @ 3.64, Asus Rampage II, Vertex 2 SSD boot and OS, 2 V-Raptors in RAID-0 for programs, 1 Tb WD RE3 for Data, GTX 285 OCE driving 2 24" Samsung 245T's, 12 Gb Dominator GT, 1 KW Corsair GTX, Asus Xonar D2X, Optical drives Etc. Win 7 Ultimate 64
RtDK
July 13, 2010 at 6:54pm
I'd be MUCH more impressed by a sub-$200 SSD with a decent amount of storage--try for 300 or 500GB. None of these seem worth the arm and the leg they're forcing you to part with.
Can anyone else speak of the improvement SSD's offer? How much faster your programs load? How much more reliable they are? How much less power you use? Etc.?
I'd appreciate other first-hand accounts.
-
"Keep the peace."
RtDK
July 14, 2010 at 2:12pm
No need to be snippy, I was genuinely curious how much these drives improve performance. I for one, would be more willing to look at WD's VelociRaptor drives for their storage capacity, and maybe have a small SSD for the OS(es).
-
"Keep the peace."
SAV602
July 18, 2010 at 4:05pm
The reason why he was "snippy" was because instead of actually taking 10 minutes to research SSD's you just ask for hand holding. Google SSD vs HDD read the reviews here or on Anandtech do some research. You being "MUCH more impressed by blah blah blah..." is just an odd statement. You pay for speed and newer technology, that's just the way things work. You posting a comment like that on a website like this is again just odd.
zakn
July 13, 2010 at 7:03pm
I bought an 80 gig Intel one as a boot drive and for general application usage. It was around $20. Two other physical drives: 2 640 gis. One for data and the other is a Backup of the SSD and the data drive.
It was the bigest upgrade in terms of actual usage i've seeen outside of building a new computer. Everything was so snappy. Boot times in the 30 second range. It completly changed how I used my computer. Before I left it on all the time, now If I walk away for 10 min, I shut it down.
I'd recomend it to anyone.
RtDK
July 14, 2010 at 2:14pm
Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it. It sounds more like SSD's are used for booting and running an OS as opposed to being the main drive for the computer. I didn't know, I've never really paid much attention to hard drives until these articles about them started popping up all over.
-
"Keep the peace."
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