OCZ Sata II

Posted 11/15/08 at 04:00:00 PM by David Murphy

OCZ uses rebadged Samsung SSD drives for its SSD storage offerings. While we’re confident that OCZ hasn’t done any internal tweaking to the drives, it’s nevertheless interesting to see that a slight performance difference exists between the twins.

In our tests, the Samsung and OCZ drives ran neck and neck in our sustained transfer read and write benchmarks, but the Samsung edged out the OCZ by 1MB/s to 2MB/s in both scenarios. The two drives posted similar results in random access tests, with the Samsung again taking the upper hand in random access write tests.

We saw a larger difference emerge when we ran our Premiere Pro test. It took 17 additional seconds to write the uncompressed AVI file to the OCZ drive than to the Samsung—a difference of 3 percent. Our PCMark Vantage measurement revealed a larger performance gap. The OCZ drive outpaced the Samsung by 5 percent while handily beating the rest of the field.

The showdown between these drives is really more a battle of price than performance, as the street price for each flip-flops among retailers. While the Samsung SSD offers marginally better overall speeds, we wouldn’t pay more for it. We’re satisfied with either SSD.