OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx?

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]gam0reily[/nom]I am not a big SSD fan, but strangely, Vertex 3 seems 1.5 times faster at writes in comparison to vertex 4. Whats up with that? :-/[/citation]

Sandforce always was better on writes than other controllers with compressible data. Flash memory inherently reads faster than it writes, so being able to compress writes allows it to write a lot more data faster because it's actually writing less data than other controllers are for compressible data. With sandforce able to compress writes, it could let it's writes more or less keep up with read speeds when it was using compressible data.

Indilinx is also known to be kinda weak on writes. It's still at least a large step up from it's previous version in the Octanes. If OCZ continues making similar improvements this often, well it seems that Sandforce's days are numbered if it can't do something about this. If Indilinx can match Sandforce's compressible write transfer speeds even with non-compressible data, then Sandforce will be losing.

 

[monsta]

Good to see that horrible sandforce controller being replaced, hope the Indilux controller see's less failures in this new drive, nice also to see a price drop from this.

 

[dalauder]

[citation][nom]acku[/nom]From the time you hit the power button to desktop.Cheers,Andrew KuTomsHardware.com[/citation]I'd like to see those HDD benchmarks rerun. A 58.7 second boot time sounds pretty high for a drive that's supposedly fast like the WD Scorpio Blue. Should my Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB be significantly faster, because it is in my tests?

 

[dalauder]

[citation][nom]dalauder[/nom]I'd like to see those HDD benchmarks rerun. A 58.7 second boot time sounds pretty high for a drive that's supposedly fast like the WD Scorpio Blue. Should my Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB be significantly faster, because it is in my tests?[/citation]To clarify, Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drives got 54 seconds on VISTA boot times at launch. I would expect significantly faster for Windows 7 and I'd expect something similar for a new Scorpio drive.

 

[karma831]

The Samsung 830 256GB is listed twice in the Power Consumption comparison. Is that a mistake/typo?

http://media.bestofmicro.com/N/V/332635/original/image005.png

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]JackNaylorPE[/nom]When I built Son No.2 's box, we installed the Seagate Barracuda XT on Friday and measured boot times at 21.2 seconds to the Password entry screen. The Vertex 3 arrived on Monday and after installing that, we measured boot times at 15.6 seconds. Not commenting on the actual times as differences in hardware as well as testing parameters could push it in any direction, but what I will comment on is the HD choice for this test.My testing showed it took 36% extra time to boot off the HD instead of the HD. This test has it taking 226 % longer. If we're gonna test the best SSD's, I'd sure like to see a best in class HD added to the comparisons.[/citation]

they measure the time from post to the desktop. Stopping at the password screen doesn't make sense, because your programs and all load after you login.

i've got a 320 GB Caviar blue, i've measured 1 min 10 seconds after POST to reach the idle desktop on a 'stale' (couldn't think of a more suitable word!) windows 7 installation. So i think that 58 seconds would be typical for most people, if not one of the better scores. (again, password screen doesn't count )

 

[mayankleoboy1]

^ 1 min 10 sec is fast
on my 5400 rpm notebook drive, to get a fully working desktop from power on took about 3 mins.
and even then the drive was at 100% work.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

installing a Vertx 2 SSd on my corei3 370M CPU, i realized that a lot of my drives potential is being lost due to poor-ish single core performance.

i think that if i put the vertex2 on a SB setup, i can get moar benefit.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]installing a Vertx 2 SSd on my corei3 370M CPU, i realized that a lot of my drives potential is being lost due to poor-ish single core performance.i think that if i put the vertex2 on a SB setup, i can get moar benefit.[/citation]

Disk drive performance has little to do with CPU performance and that CPU is not a single core and has very good single threaded and dual threaded performance regardless. It's a hell of a lot better than any core 2 or Phenom II based laptop CPU in that regard. It also has decent quad threaded performance (I think that all i3s are dual core CPUs with Hyper-Threading Technology, but just to be sure I even looked it up on Intel's site and confirmed that the i3-370M has two Hyper-Threaded cores).

Basically, no, you wouldn't get more benefit from a faster CPU.

 

[elkein]

This is the first SSD release in a while that's made me sit up. Better performance and lowewr price, it's not a secret to make the sale. Idle power isn't a personal breaker when we are talking 1 watt that for me equals little more than a $1.
I want to see these things in the wild, without retailers actually marking them up to move old inventory.

 

[rex86]

I'm glad to see some healthy competition in the SSD market. This is something we all need.

 

[keith2468]

With SSDs I want to know two things first:
1. If I store data on it, will I get the data back consistently for at least 5 years?
2. If there is a powerfluctuation during a write-cycle, will it consistently store the data?

That means in any review of SSDs, the first thing I am going to look for is how it handles voltage fluctuations.

I don't see that here.

Who cares how fast an SSD is if it can only be relied upon as a write-only device ???

 

[kikiking]

Let me ask something really quick. I am planning on getting another Vertex III max iops 120gb edition. When do you think the max iops editions for these drives will release?

 

[nekromobo]

[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.[/citation]

Whats a BSOD once a week between friends? They really should just do stone solid no hassle drive AND atleast get the firmware updating crazy easy and reliable. Intel and m4's for me.. OK I admit the 256gb version is a bit burning idea

 

[Marcus52]

[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.[/citation]

Most people that bash products order one, it fails for whatever reason, they send it back and get another, it works - and they think "My failure rate is 50%!"

Often, no consideration is given to any other possible source of problem, either.

From reading reviews over the last couple of years and seeing how often the controllers on SSDs are buggy when first released, regardless of whose name is on the outside of the package, I'm really glad to see companies put effort into developing controllers themselves (Samsung and OCZ). Hopefully, this will put pressure on the entire industry to not only vie for the fastest, but also the best in terms of reliability from the start.

 

[dgingeri]

Based partly on this review, along with the Anandtech review, I decided to get a 120GB version. While the writes are quite a bit slower, the reads are still close to these. It's great. I love it. Money well spent.

 

[masterjaw]

It's a rare case when a new SSD comes out and apparently is cheaper than the previous gen.

 

[Guest]

With SSDs I want to know two things first:
1. If I store data on it, will I get the data back consistently for at least 5 years?
2. If there is a powerfluctuation during a write-cycle, will it consistently store the data?

That means in any review of SSDs, the first thing I am going to look for is how it handles voltage fluctuations.

I don't see that here.

Who cares how fast an SSD is if it can only be relied upon as a write-only device ???

I'm not sure, what you're on about. I've experienced the same thing with HDDs. It is PSU at fault. Needless to say, if your PSU is messing with storage, get a new one immediately.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]I'm not sure, what you're on about. I've experienced the same thing with HDDs. It is PSU at fault. Needless to say, if your PSU is messing with storage, get a new one immediately.[/citation]

What part of the computer is at fault for a failure is irrelevant. If the PSU fails and causes a surge, will the SSD suffer a failure to write the data it needs to write, or will it finish writing successfully?

 

[Guest]

Is there a score for the Vertex 4 128GB to compare to the other drives found at http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ssd-charts-2011/AS-SSD-Overall-Total-Score,2792.html ?

 

[Guest]

I'm thinking the switch might have something to do with trying to get away from the sandforce name. OCZ got a lot of bad press over the issues with the sandforce controllers, and changing to a different type might just be a good marketing decision with some added benefits.

 

[youssef 2010]

Way to go OCZ, way to go indeed

 

[Winning29]

Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.

http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zo

I'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Winning29[/nom]Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zoI'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.[/citation]

Please, load up the new firmware and do another test.