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OCZ Vertex solid-state drive

Vroom

We're fully aware that OCZ and the other SSD manufacturers can easily change the read and write speeds by considerably more than 20MB/s with a revision to the drive’s firmware. The question here is whether a single Indilinx controller can do a better job than a pair of JMicron chips in Raid mode, so we slapped the Vertex on the test rig alongside an Intel X25-M SSD and our trusty 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black HDD.

OCZ Vertex SSD

Inside the Vertex...

We have continued to evolve the testing software that we use with SSDs as they behave so differently to hard drives. We still use HD Tach but ignore the burst speed figure and instead concentrate on the average read and write figures. The random access time also plays a part but every SSD has a random access time that is a fraction of a millisecond far less than 7200rpm HDDs with their rotating platters that have a delay of 18ms. In this review, we'll also be using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 along with ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.34.

For our file transfer tests we still copy 2GB of movie files - six 350MB files - but we have added a second test where we copy 2GB of MP3 tracks. This collection is made up of 480 files that average 4.2MB in size, which is our idea of a small file. The files aren’t tiny but they are true to life.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the OCZ Apex and 256GB Samsung PB22-J SSDs that we have recently reviewed as they were reclaimed by their manufacturers double quick. This means that our table of test results is a bit of a mix and match as we had to plug in the figures that we previously obtained for these two drives. Consequently, there are a few gaps in the graphs.

OCZ Apex SSD

...and inside the Apex

The bar charts generated by the ATTO Disk Benchmark graphs reinforce the figures we've previously seen in HD Tach and our file transfer tests as the Intel X25-M - equipped with firmware 8610 - has write speeds that are horribly low. They top out at a sustained speed of 50MB/s compared to the OCZ Vertex at 200MB/s and even our WD Caviar Black writes at 80MB/s.

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