OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 27, 2009
Updated • Feb 20, 2014
Hardware
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10

While I'm overall pretty happy with the purchase of the OCZ Core Series II SATA Solid State Drive some disadvantages do come to light every now and then. This happens in situations where many small blocks are written on the Solid State Drive leading to an unresponsive system for a few seconds. This thankfully does not happen to often and the benefits, especially the fast application load time are incredible experiences. Up til now the fastest conventional platter driven hard drives like the Western Digital Velociraptor were able to match the speed of the SSDs in most areas at a more competitive price.

A recent review of the OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD might be a turning point though as it is one of the first Solid State Drives that leaves even the fastest platter driven hard drives behind in both benchmarks but also real life tests. Benchmarks are great to compare speeds but the situation can be different under real life circumstances. CD Freaks have posted an extensive test of the OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD and compare it to other platter driven hard drives like Samsung's Spinpoint F1 or Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10.

The results are astounding: The OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD booted Windows Vista to the Welcome Screen in 11.54, install Vista SP1 in 16.12 minutes compared to roughly 40 minutes for all other tested hard drives, performed a Microsoft Office installation in 2.13 seconds compared to 3.43 minutes for the second place finisher or 24052 points in PCMark Vantage HDD suite result while the platter driven hard drives managed scores around the 4000 mark.

The conclusion of the reviewer is absolutely positive:

The OCZ Technology Vertex series drives are quite incredible. This is the first SSD drive I can honestly say is completely stable when used as a system drive. It's also incredibly fast.

Reading access times are lightning fast and applications load in an instant, making the Vertex series of drives ideal as the operating system drive with all the user’s installed applications.

The only negative aspect about that drive is the price. The OCZ Vertex Series will ship with 60, 120 and 250 Gigabytes of capacity and retail for $199, $399 and $829 respectively.

Additional reviews:

PC Perspective

The new OCZ Vertex solid state drive is one of the most impressive SSDs we have tested to date. I know that there is much excitement in the hardware community about this drive and for good reason: it uses a brand new controller from a brand new company and as such performance was an unknown. Many in the community have been billing it as the first true competitor to Intel's X25-M line of mainstream MLC drives and it indeed lives up to that status.

Benchmark Reviews

Based on the collection of benchmark performance tests we've conducted, the OCZ Vertex offers linear bandwidth so far ahead of previous competition that it might require calling this a new generation product in order to justify how so many other 'new' products have just been left behind. The MLC Samsung flash modules paired to a 64MB cache buffer on this 120GB Vertex SSD help yield a 0.10 ms response time. ATTO Disk Benchmark tool reported an impressive 249 MBps maximum read bandwidth in our tests, but only 138 MBps maximum write. HD Tach recorded additional high-performance results, with approximate bandwidth speeds reaching 236.6 MBps read and 162.6 MBps write. EVEREST's linear full-sector bandwidth performance was a steady 247.6 MBps read-from, and an impressive 225.2 MBps write-to speed.

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Comments

  1. man friday said on April 15, 2009 at 6:06 pm
    Reply

    Might be interesting to have a best practices or tips and tricks in one convenient place on how to put temp, cache and other write data on another drive. Mind you write data becomes read data as soon as its written so effectively the price of my hod rod drive is about to increase because I am still putting data elsewhere and cached data is where it is for performance related reasons anyway. I for one will be happy to pay extra for the speed boost but only pay once, happy to wait for SLC SSD and not bother with relocating data.

  2. Thinker said on March 1, 2009 at 4:56 pm
    Reply

    30GB OCZ Solid with RAID 0. Should be fast. But it is fast only on big-block operations, like file copy. Installing an application makes windows almost freeze.

  3. Thinker said on February 28, 2009 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    Martin, I got 2x30GB OCZ Solid SSD and am TOTALLY disappointed. Max read speed I got is 240MB/s. BUT what is it for, when random 4KB reads (NTFS cluster size) shows, that 2xSSD is SLOWER than 1 old HDD 2 times!

    1. Martin said on February 28, 2009 at 12:51 pm
      Reply

      Thinker what’s the model that you got?

  4. LethAL said on February 27, 2009 at 8:52 pm
    Reply

    Wow. I had considering getting a Core II, but the lack of a cache killed it for me. It looks like I’ll have to save up for one of these.

  5. Dotan Cohen said on February 27, 2009 at 6:30 pm
    Reply

    It’s been _years_ since I’ve drooled over hardware. Now I’m drooling. Thanks!

    1. Martin said on February 27, 2009 at 7:07 pm
      Reply

      Yeah I went to some online retail sites but here in Europe the 120 Gigabyte version sells for €370 Euro. That’s a lot for one hard drive with that capacity. I’m still considering it, maybe getting the 60 GB edition instead considering that I’m doing perfectly well with a 32 GB SSD as my primary partition at the moment.

  6. Cheryl said on February 27, 2009 at 5:22 pm
    Reply

    Interesting article. Of course, for me, the price is a dampener. I guess I’ll have to wait until prices come down to try this out.

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