OCZ Vertex Drives

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Originally Posted by Halk

Of course it was delayed. It wasn't delayed for months though. You need to realise that people see XS as a source of information, and posting a pack of lies is irresponsible. There's perhaps a grain of truth behind each of them. Yes some people have had problems, yes it was delayed, yes eventually performance can become degraded. But why the enormous exaggerations?

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I wouldn't say enormous exaggerations- but anyway the problem I see is that how do people even know if their drive is functioning correctly if the benchmarks are not consistent. There needs to be a way to figure out what baseline performance should be for every drive out there-

Then, if performance is not at expected levels, then there needs to be a way to distinguish improper configuration/incompatibilities versus ssd performance degradation.

From what I have seen, no one really knows what standard to expect when benching the Vertex drives, as the benchmarks I have seen are nowhere near consistent. So, I am very interested to see what the "professional" review sites will come up with.

From what I've seen on the OCZ forums, it's a lot of telling people to upgrade their hardware to hardware that was created within the last couple months, which is asinine- If there is going to be a requirement like that, there should be a very well placed disclaimer on all places where these drives are sold. Where is the compatibility list? After the Core drive issues, I would have thought a compatibility list would have been produced for all future products- As well as a proper configuration for each-

Anyone else on the same page as me?

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Originally Posted by audienceofone

This version works for the Intel drives, later ones don't.

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Thanks :up:

In regard to HDDerase 3.30. You'll need to shut off AHCI in order for it to see the drives though. Also I could not get it to work with my EX58-DS4. It would lock up before recognizing the drives. I had to use use it on a different AMD system.

Hm we'll see.. respective test systems are a DFI 680i LT (2 years old - probably the last 680i alive :ROTF:) and an EX58-Extreme...

Also it won't see the drives on your 5405, you will need to plug the drive dirrectly to the mobo. (At least in my experience.)

Guys I won't be using them on my HW raidcons... nor in my personal rigs either, for that matter :(
Let's just hope the 680i doesn't totally bottleneck the poor drive lol.

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Originally Posted by audienceofone

1. Does degradation affect real use performance? (I can answer this at least for the X25-E. No).

2. If the time taken to overwrite a cell is quantifiable the drop in performance should match depending on how much data is being overwritten. (If it isn't that would seem to raise more questions).

3. Does degradation occur quicker on smaller drivers in comparison to larger drives? (If it doesn't that would seem to raise more questions).

I'm just an end user of SDD technology trying to work this out. Thanks for hearing me out.

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this is what people should concentrate on

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Originally Posted by karateo

this is what people should concentrate on

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Thanks Karateo,

I've moved my post to a new thread as this is an SDD issue not a Vertex bashing issue. (And yes I blame myself for making it look that way.) Constructive views on a generic SDD level are most welcome.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...54#post3706154

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Originally Posted by Griff805

the problem I see is that how do people even know if their drive is functioning correctly if the benchmarks are not consistent. There needs to be a way to figure out what baseline performance should be for every drive out there-

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I think you're right on the money there. We've seen that results that are worse on ATTO are actually better in real use. The traditional low level benchmarks are pretty much useless for everything bar sustained transfer speeds, and for most purposes those don't relate to the general performance of the drive in any real way.

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Originally Posted by Griff805

Then, if performance is not at expected levels, then there needs to be a way to distinguish improper configuration/incompatibilities versus ssd performance degradation.

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Right. And from there people can see if for example their motherboard is 15% worse than it should be, etc. And from that point we can then go on to really find out what stripe size works best, what tweaks work and what don't, what effect RAID0 and RAID5 have, if a RAID controller does scale up right... etc etc. Until then we don't really have any way.

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Originally Posted by Griff805

From what I have seen, no one really knows what standard to expect when benching the Vertex drives, as the benchmarks I have seen are nowhere near consistent. So, I am very interested to see what the "professional" review sites will come up with.

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Dead right there again. It was pretty much at the time of Vertex being launched that all these revelations came into the "public eye", so to speak. Up until then we'd all been focused on sustained read/write performance, and it took a fair bit of convincing to set the see-saw of opinion in entirely the other direction. I think it's pretty much widely accepted by anyone who either is interested in hardware or does a bit of research before buying that the sustained rates are not the whole picture. It's reasonable to assume that there is some link between overall performance and the sustained rates - but it's not a direct link, generally speaking a drive that's faster overall will be faster at sustained transfers too. However there's now at least 2 drives out there that have sacrificed some level of sustained performance in order to get better overall performance. We know the Intel drives have a lot of controller work in the background to smooth things out, and we know the Vertex has internal cache and an IOP favouring firmware. Perhaps the reason for the lack of reviews is simply because the hardware sites don't want to produce a review with no real benchmarks.

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Originally Posted by Griff805

From what I've seen on the OCZ forums, it's a lot of telling people to upgrade their hardware to hardware that was created within the last couple months, which is asinine- If there is going to be a requirement like that, there should be a very well placed disclaimer on all places where these drives are sold. Where is the compatibility list? After the Core drive issues, I would have thought a compatibility list would have been produced for all future products- As well as a proper configuration for each-

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I'm not sure I entirely agree with you there. I think it tends to fall into a couple of categories. The first is mainly the JMicron drives where people have been advised that their motherboard SATA controllers are bad. This is pretty much true, however the workarounds do seem to get round it in the vast majority of situations. It's no surprise that motherboards are designed with what labels the manufacturer can stick on the box in mind, rather than future proof for what technology might be around the corner. The whole SATA standard is at best deliberately misleading. They don't want things labelled SATA 2 or SATA 3. They want them labelled SATA 3Gb and SATA 6Gb. My opinion is that they want to be able to shout big numbers, and the fact that the hardware just is not capable is a side issue.

The other category is where the performance from the drive doesn't meet the performance from other drives with different controllers. I don't know what OCZ can or should do about this. Expecting them to test every single motherboard out there is too much, it's not done with RAM either and that's a more mature market than SSDs. Certainly there's no disclaimers on memory that state : "This memory is rated at 1066, however your motherboard could be a 2 year old one which won't run it." I think the onus is on both the motherboard manufacturers and the SATA-IO (the standards organisation). The SATA-IO are happy to brand equipment that is patently not fit for purpose, simply because they did not anticipate anyone could use it at the rated speeds, motherboard manufacturers as I've said were happy to market hardware that worked with everything currently available, but didn't really do what they advertised. It's along the same lines as advertising a wrist watch that can withstand a nuclear bomb. Nobody is ever going to test that it can withstand a nuclear bomb, but it's good enough that a car can drive over it without the face cracking. All of a sudden SSD drives appeared and the equipment sucks.

Having said all that though, most people have either resolved the problem, or found out that their laptop is crippled to use SATA1. For those expecting their motherboard to deliver RAID0 performance I think it's nobodies fault but their own for assuming that - and again probably the motherboard manufacturer for not stating that : This motherboard is rated at SATA 3.0Gb but can't actually deliver it, and you can just plain forget trying to run RAID0 to increase performance since due to the chipset constraints we used a PCI lane (or an x1 PCIe 1.0)to connect the Southbridge to the Northbridge.

I think all in all the OCZ community has done a great deal towards advancing knowledge of SSD technology, and most of the problems are not related to what OCZ actually sells, it's down to Windows being optimised for mechanical drives and as I've said hardware not actually being capable of what the manufacturer claims (or probably more exactly what they imply). Why that has happened I don't know if it can all be put down to OCZ's credit. Perhaps the problems with the JMicron controllers helped the OCZ forum, perhaps it's just a fluke it happened with OCZ forums and not one of the other companies that sold JMicron controller drives. I believe it's at least partly due to the way OCZ operate that they're the ones who have the forum everybody reads.

As far as what's in store for SSD in the future I very much hope that SSD on SATA is not the only way. The SATA standard is not set by companies making SSDs, it's set by large PC vendors and mechanical drive makers. I don't for one second believe that they're going to turn around and admit that SSD exposed their marketing spin. Nor do I suppose they're going to go hell for leather towards doing all they can to help SSD technology. SSDs don't actually need SATA, currently SSD manufacturers are taking new technology and making it into old technology. There's no reason why things like Fusion drives can't be mainstream in a year or a few years without any need for a SATA controller to connect to the SATA controller on the drive. Just whack it into a PCIe slot.

Edit : I should probably link this page of cynical spin from the SATA-IO. Notice how they are insisting the technology must be referred to as SATA 6.0Gb for marketing purposes. The same way they wanted SATA2 to be referred to as SATA3.0Gb in marketing.

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Originally Posted by Halk

Edit : I should probably link this page of cynical spin from the SATA-IO. Notice how they are insisting the technology must be referred to as SATA 6.0Gb for marketing purposes. The same way they wanted SATA2 to be referred to as SATA3.0Gb in marketing.

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Hehe, I LOLed at that one. Who the heck is going to call it SATA 6 Gb/s+? :rofl: Next thing they will demand "Serial Advanced Technology Attachment Six Billion Bit Per Seconds Plus". Piss off!

It's not used - it's pre-owned.
It's not a car - it's a vehicle.
It's not a mattress - it's a sleeping system.
It's not a toilet - it's a porcelain bowel movement receptacle!

Here is an Atto after I have finished installing all my games and programs. The drive is 45% full and the drive has been used as an OS drive for 4 days. I am not sure why it is faster than my previous screenshot (post 51) but I definitely havent experienced any slowdown yet.

well technology has its price.
The usage patterns also depends on who is using the drives also.
usb keys is a common and as are mp3 players so flash has been around a long time.

ssd has advance as much so several options occours,
software OS isnt done for ssd, the controller isnt good enough yet, so ssd is breaching into several different areas at the same time more or less taking the hardware manufacture and software with suprise.

1. OS not optimized.
2. Benchmarking programs not showing the picture.
3. hardware lagging.

its a mess ;)

My ssd as I use them work fine, and my desktop is snappy and as I want it to be.
However, Vertex and intels ssd, is just better due to controllers and cache.

The field havent matured yet.

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Originally Posted by babalouj

Here is an Atto after I have finished installing all my games and programs. The drive is 45% full and the drive has been used as an OS drive for 4 days. I am not sure why it is faster than my previous screenshot (post 51) but I definitely havent experienced any slowdown yet.

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babalouj, you seem to be bucking the trend:confused: Have you applied any tweaks? if so did you apply them after the first benchmark? I've attached the excel sheet if you want to keep track of how the drive performs over time. I've put a formula in the % variation cells so they will automatically change if you change the figures in column B,C F or G.

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Originally Posted by audienceofone

babalouj, you seem to be bucking the trend:confused: Have you applied any tweaks? if so did you apply them after the first benchmark? I've attached the excel sheet if you want to keep track of how the drive performs over time. I've put a formula in the % variation cells so they will automatically change if you change the figures in column B,C F or G.

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The only tweaks I have applied is turning off indexing and defrag. I am using this drive on my EP45-UD3R using the ICH10R controller and the newest .1014 Intel Chipset drivers. As far as the speed increase, it may be the new sata cable I am using. I was using a sata 1 24" cable and now I am using a sata II 12" cable.

It would be interesting to see how things develop if you can spare the time.

Where is the raid -0- Vertex benches? I bought one Vertex 30Gb now waiting for some reviews and benches on the raid -0-. But all I see is WW3 against this drive now wow. I see everyone running out buying the Intel E, and I thought this one keeps up with it for a better price am I missing something here? When ever I see a posting of this ssd it is followed by a bashing.

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Originally Posted by Lu(ky

Where is the raid -0- Vertex benches? I bought one Vertex 30Gb now waiting for some reviews and benches on the raid -0-. But all I see is WW3 against this drive now wow. I see everyone running out buying the Intel E, and I thought this one keeps up with it for a better price am I missing something here? When ever I see a posting of this ssd it is followed by a bashing.

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There aren't any direct comparisons at this time. Just wait, hopefully some review site will do a proper review.

It SEEMS to be a decent drive for the money. It also seems to be slower than X25-M at most of the canned benchmarks (basically everything but sequential large writes), but it is also slightly cheaper and available in 30GB sizes. However there isn't even a single review comparing the two with the recent firmware so no real world comparisons yet, which are what's important because canned benchmarks are questionable at this point. Just wait for some to come out.

I just ordered from newegg 3x vertex 60GB and Adaptec 5405

I will set all ssds in raid0 and i will run some benchmark when i receive it :)

I hope i will not regret :D

http://ssdtoolkit.com/2009/03/10/ssd...el-x25-m-80gb/
x25 vs vertex

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Originally Posted by audienceofone

Wrong. Tony (OCZ) is saying "you have to align" with Vista 64 as well as disable indexing and prefetch on the Vertex.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=52462

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"align is auto in vista but you may find manual align gives a littrle extra speed."

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...t=52216&page=7

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Originally Posted by Lu(ky

Where is the raid -0- Vertex benches? I bought one Vertex 30Gb now waiting for some reviews and benches on the raid -0-. But all I see is WW3 against this drive now wow. I see everyone running out buying the Intel E, and I thought this one keeps up with it for a better price am I missing something here? When ever I see a posting of this ssd it is followed by a bashing.

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Too many people upset that they emptied their bank account on X25's!
They don't won't other drives that are cheaper threatening their performance crown! Let's face it no one want's to feel like they wasted a ton of money!

I have 2x 30gb raid0 On ICH10R, performance is amazing so far as haven't used KillDisk.
Never had a SSD before, so wasn't sure what to expect! System is fluid and very snappy, system starts up extremely quickly i.e. one XP bar and then welcome screen and then fully loaded desktop. Benchmarks are still strong.

Total Cost = £220 + 6.99 postage

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Originally Posted by Rhys

Too many people upset that they emptied their bank account on X25's!
They don't won't other drives that are cheaper threatening their performance crown! Let's face it no one want's to feel like they wasted a ton of money!

I have 2x 30gb raid0 On ICH10R, performance is amazing so far as haven't used KillDisk.
Never had a SSD before, so wasn't sure what to expect! System is fluid and very snappy, system starts up extremely quickly i.e. one XP bar and then welcome screen and then fully loaded desktop. Benchmarks are still strong.

Total Cost = £220 + 6.99 postage

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Thanks but I have Vista Ultimate x64 and I already have one 30GB I have 2 more in my newegg basket telling me to hurry..:p: I have no plans using a raid card only ICH10R for now...

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Originally Posted by koc

I just ordered from newegg 3x vertex 60GB and Adaptec 5405

I will set all ssds in raid0 and i will run some benchmark when i receive it :)

I hope i will not regret :D

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Don't forget to post HDtach, HDtune and CrystalDisk results...:rolleyes:

/end sarcasm...:p:

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Originally Posted by Rhys

Too many people upset that they emptied their bank account on X25's!
They don't won't other drives that are cheaper threatening their performance crown! Let's face it no one want's to feel like they wasted a ton of money!

I have 2x 30gb raid0 On ICH10R, performance is amazing so far as haven't used KillDisk.

Total Cost = £220 + 6.99 postage

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:rolleyes:

Your 30GB Vertex' are $4.50/GB
An X25-M is $4.53/GB. I highly call that significantly cheaper.

I bought my X25-M after Vertex' release and don't regret it one bit. The Vertex' are a great budget drive, but remember they still fall significantly short in small random writes and IOPS. So no need to start flame baiting and trolling. :down:

vertex does fine in small random writes, its core/corev2 that were particularly bad at it

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Originally Posted by Levish

vertex does fine in small random writes, its core/corev2 that were particularly bad at it

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It is a significant improvement over the Cores, but still a ways behind.

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Originally Posted by Lu(ky

Where is the raid -0- Vertex benches? I bought one Vertex 30Gb now waiting for some reviews and benches on the raid -0-. But all I see is WW3 against this drive now wow. I see everyone running out buying the Intel E, and I thought this one keeps up with it for a better price am I missing something here? When ever I see a posting of this ssd it is followed by a bashing.

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I think I need to do some serious tweaking or forget about canned benchies... My single 30Gb maxes out at 166 in ATTO. Tried 32K and 128K stripe. RAID0 topped at about 300. Will post screen shots tonight after work.

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Originally Posted by lowfat

:rolleyes:

Your 30GB Vertex' are $4.50/GB
An X25-M is $4.53/GB. I highly call that significantly cheaper.

I bought my X25-M after Vertex' release and don't regret it one bit. The Vertex' are a great budget drive, but remember they still fall significantly short in small random writes and IOPS. So no need to start flame baiting and trolling. :down:

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What's performance like compared to 2x vertex raid 0?

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Originally Posted by lowfat

It is a significant improvement over the Cores, but still a ways behind.

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Proof ?

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Originally Posted by Rhys

What's performance like compared to 2x vertex raid 0?

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Well I never found RAID to be all that beneficial to real world tasks. Benchmarks yes, but opening applications/games/etc no. And yes I have used SSD + RAID before. I was using 4 patriot Warp V2's on an ARC-1220 before the X25-M.

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Originally Posted by 3Z3VH

Proof ?

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I was just going from what I've seen of the Vertex so far. But I'll order a 30GB Vertex now and compare them for myself.

30Gb is the crippled Vertex... less cache. 120Gb and up are their full-speed drives.

As far as RAID goes, in the HDD world I have seen huge real-world improvements, as my seek times and throughput both have improved using RAID. With two 74GB raptors in a RAID0 I saw a large improvement in speed over the single 74GB raptor in that same machine. Windows booted faster, my games loaded quicker, and even opening a browser was peppier. With the low seek times of SSDs, I question RAID's effect on speed, but I do see the point of using SSDs in RAID to speed up the random writes using a RAID controller's cache... I just have no real-world comparison to say the RAID made any difference with an SSD.

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Originally Posted by 3Z3VH

30Gb is the crippled Vertex... less cache. 120Gb and up are their full-speed drives.

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I am aware of that but way am I going to spent $550CAD just to compare how it does to an X25-M. And Rhys was calling the Intel SSD guys out on

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Too many people upset that they emptied their bank account on X25's!
They don't won't other drives that are cheaper threatening their performance crown! Let's face it no one want's to feel like they wasted a ton of money!

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And he was referring to the 30GB drives.

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Originally Posted by flopper

http://ssdtoolkit.com/2009/03/10/ssd...el-x25-m-80gb/
x25 vs vertex

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That's a review of a review. The Firmware they used in that drive is not the retail firmware.

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Originally Posted by lowfat

I was just going from what I've seen of the Vertex so far. But I'll order a 30GB Vertex now and compare them for myself.

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Nice! I was this >< close to doing that myself, but was waiting for anand review.

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Originally Posted by lowfat

I am aware of that but way am I going to spent $550CAD just to compare how it does to an X25-M. And Rhys was calling the Intel SSD guys out on And he was referring to the 30GB drives.

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Hi Lowfat

Apparently a new firmware update should be released next week.
If your testing only a single drive then I'm hoping AHCI will be enabled for small file read writes! Apparently Raid is a superset of AHCI, Could this be why the benchmarks show disproportionately better small file performance when on ICH10R raid 0?

Anyway got to admire your willingness to buy a vertex to compare, are you planning on selling it after or will you have a use for it?

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Originally Posted by Rhys

Hi Lowfat

Apparently a new firmware update should be released next week.
If your testing only a single drive then I'm hoping AHCI will be enabled for small file read writes! Apparently Raid is a superset of AHCI, Could this be why the benchmarks show disproportionately better performance when in ICH10R raid 0?

Anyway got to admire your willingness to buy a vertex to compare, are you planning on selling it after or will you have a use for it?

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If they have a firmware that fully supports AHCI by the time the drive arrives I'll test with. I doubt I'll sell it. Either I'll use it as an OS drive and use the X25-M for games (more important to me than OS quickness :p:) Or throw in in my HTPC as a boot drive.

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Don't forget to post HDtach, HDtune and CrystalDisk results...

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sure :)

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Originally Posted by 3Z3VH

30Gb is the crippled Vertex... less cache. 120Gb and up are their full-speed drives.

As far as RAID goes, in the HDD world I have seen huge real-world improvements, as my seek times and throughput both have improved using RAID. With two 74GB raptors in a RAID0 I saw a large improvement in speed over the single 74GB raptor in that same machine. Windows booted faster, my games loaded quicker, and even opening a browser was peppier. With the low seek times of SSDs, I question RAID's effect on speed, but I do see the point of using SSDs in RAID to speed up the random writes using a RAID controller's cache... I just have no real-world comparison to say the RAID made any difference with an SSD.

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OCZs spec for the drives was 32MB cache on the 30 and 60GB drives. It turns out that pre-production ones have arrived with the 32MB cache, but retail come with 64MB cache. Post from Tony here.

I'm not so sure about RAID improving seek times, however when I've looked at the overall performance 2 drives gives a noticable boost, 3 gives a bit of a boost, but 4 or more it really does tail off.

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Originally Posted by Griff805

That's a review of a review. The Firmware they used in that drive is not the retail firmware.

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Right. Since the original reviewer has had both the high seq firmware (the one that did not ship) and the review on that site still seems to have the old firmware I'd be a bit careful with those figures. They certainly do make the Vertex look like the equal of the Intel, but we're still really waiting for a slew of proper reviews.

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Originally Posted by Halk

OCZs spec for the drives was 32MB cache on the 30 and 60GB drives. It turns out that pre-production ones have arrived with the 32MB cache, but retail come with 64MB cache. Post from Tony here.
...

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I stand corrected, thanks for the correction Halk !

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Originally Posted by Halk

OCZs spec for the drives was 32MB cache on the 30 and 60GB drives. It turns out that pre-production ones have arrived with the 32MB cache, but retail come with 64MB cache. Post from Tony here.

I'm not so sure about RAID improving seek times, however when I've looked at the overall performance 2 drives gives a noticable boost, 3 gives a bit of a boost, but 4 or more it really does tail off.

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Hey Halk, just want to say you've been really helpful with regards to info on the vertex drives, much appreciated.

You mentioned something quoted above about after more then 3 drives in raid it tails off. I have an adaptec 5405 raid controller and was planning to get 4, 30gb ssd's to use all the ports but do you not think i will get a performance improvement having 4 over 3 drives?

Also is there any reviews of having 4 vertex drives using a hardware controller?

There's sadly only two Vertex reviews I'm aware of. One is quite in depth, on CD Freaks. The reviewer has attempted to make it stutter, but she wasn't able to. There's some real world testing done on it. Sadly though she didn't have an Intel drive available at the time so there was no comparison. The other review was at PC Perspective, however OCZ at the 11th hour changed the firmware due to customer demand for a drive that handles smaller file operations faster, as a result their review doesn't show the correct firmware (as far as I'm aware). They do have the right firmware, so hopefully a review is coming.

There's a general problem with SSD reviews since we're now learning that ATTO and HD Tach etc benchmarks are nigh on useless. What matters is how the drive performs in real life, and we don't appear to have either a plethora of benchmarks available, nor a widely accepted benchmark. Add to that drive alignement has an impact which can make some reviews useless, and finally that performance varies over time. All of these issues are progressing, but it's a bit of a minefield trying to accurately identify the performance of a drive.

The only SSD RAID0 scaling review I've read was not for OCZ drives, it was for (I think?) Samsung drives, it was a very good review and I believe the high level tests were with PC Mark - not sure if it was Vantage or 05. What it showed was that for some tests RAID has little or no impact, for others RAID0 with 2 drives gives a very significant performance boost, less with 3, and actually in some stats RAID0 with 4 drives was worse. I don't think RAID0 with 4 drives will ever be worse in real world performance. However just looking at the numbers...

RAID0 1 drive (really no RAID) - Baseline performance 1.0
RAID0 2 drives - Performance 2.0 (100% increase)
RAID0 3 drives - Performance 3.0 (50% increase)
RAID0 4 drives - Performance 4.0 (33% increase)

As you can see performance increases from the drives give diminishing marginal gains. And that's assuming perfect scaling, which simply isn't going to happen. Those percentage increases will always be worse in real world performance. Simply adding a drive to a RAID array will add some degree of latency to some tasks.

What I have seen with RAID performance that I cannot comfortably explain is performance increases where the drive is operating with I/Os below the stripe size. As I understand RAID0 performance should be near identical to a single drive. Perhaps this simply means that there is some sort of gain from command queuing - while one drive is busy then so is the other getting a different file.

Here is the review I was talking about.

^^^^

You can't really take that review as a basis of raid performance increases. The real world tasks they did are supposed to get good boosts from raid setups, but if they measured loading times of apps there really wouldn't be much difference, if any, when going to R0. Many reviewers have done comparisons like these in the past with a similar conclusion. That Tech Report article is one example. 4x X25-E array loads games slower in some cases than a single X25-E. Access time rises slightly when you stick drives into R0 and sequential rates go up. App loading is mainly dependent on access time/iops so sometimes you will even see raid hurting more than helping.

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Originally Posted by Halk

OCZs spec for the drives was 32MB cache on the 30 and 60GB drives. It turns out that pre-production ones have arrived with the 32MB cache, but retail come with 64MB cache. Post from Tony here.

I'm not so sure about RAID improving seek times, however when I've looked at the overall performance 2 drives gives a noticable boost, 3 gives a bit of a boost, but 4 or more it really does tail off.

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Well I got one 30GB Vertex now from Mwave and on the retail box it says 64MB cache I thought it was a misprint..

If you use a really small stripe size does it increase IOPS? I'm curious. My 3 x 30 GB Core v2 array is about to be deprecated by a Vertex. I might just try a 4k stripe and use it for storing the 1 game I play and things like the page file.

Are you all using the 128 alignment? I've read 32, 64 and 128 beeing recommended at the OCZ forums!?

Tried 128 (Vertex 120Gb) on my Lenovo T61 laptop and all it can manage is about 120 mb/s under Windows 7....

Here are my results with 2 30GB in RAID0 on my EVGA X58 ICH10R controller.

I'm pleased with the results.

128K stripe with an offset of 128. I experimented with 1024 and 512 offsets, but 128 yielded the best results. My burst speed is not too shabby :)

@Orangeblast
can you please re-run the crystalmark with 1000mb?

Need some advice,

I have a Rampage extreme2 and a Lsi 3 Gb/s, SAS, 8-port Adapter, i currently use this adapter with my two hp 15k sas drives in raid0. I want to upgrade to two 120gb vertex drives and put them in raid0. My question is should i use the on board controller from my rampage extreme or the lsi sas controller.

Here are the specs of my of card
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/prod...2er/index.html

P.s Will two Vertex drives in raid0 be faster then two of these in raid0? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822332008

Thanks for the help

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Originally Posted by karateo

@Orangeblast
can you please re-run the crystalmark with 1000mb?

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Sure...I'll try it right now.

EDIT: Done.

thanks.
they look very good

welcome to the SSD world :)

Thanks. This is my first time in RAID too lol.

So far its been a pleasure. Snappy as hell! The 2 30GB vertex drives have my Vista 64 install while my VelociRaptor has my games and such while my 1 TB Caviar Black has my storage.

There is a guy on the OCZ forums who is using the same controller as me and is achieving better performance with a 128 Stripe and Vista default alignment of 1024....here's the image:

http://www.hkepc.com/forum/attachmen...bbQclimomh.jpg

http://www.hkepc.com/forum/attachmen...IkLRqIuIYZ.jpg

Pretty impressive, the difference is he is using 2 120GB Vertex drives in RAID0...seems he too has vista 64 on there as well.

I'm not quite sure why the 120 is faster than my 30GB....all Vertex drives have 64 megs of cache.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Orangeblast

I'm not quite sure why the 120 is faster than my 30GB....all Vertex drives have 64 megs of cache.

---

The controller on the 30GB and 60GB models have access to fewer channels = slower. There was an article on DailyTech and Tony confirmed this.

Still it's a nice setup, thx for sharing the result

Cheers

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NeedMoMegaHurtZ

The controller on the 30GB and 60GB models have access to fewer channels = slower. There was an article on DailyTech and Tony confirmed this.

Still it's a nice setup, thx for sharing the result

Cheers

---

Ahhh, okay, I understand now. It was my misunderstanding, I thought it had something to do with the on board cache. I see now its controller related.

thanks!

Flashing instructions - follow closely, I thought I bricked my drive when attempted ACHI mode.

2x32Gb Vertex on ICH10R RAID0, Native SATA mode on, write-back cache ON.

Before (sorry it was not totally reset when I benched that)
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/c...ta-wbcache.png

After (clean wiped by flashing)
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/c...esata-wbca.png

After (clean wiped by flashing)
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/c...0-nativesa.png

We will see more ridiculous speeds in the next 6-12 months. SATA wont cut it anymore - we will need straight up PCIe attached bootable devices. Seagate and WD better wake the f@ck up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DYM

Are you all using the 128 alignment? I've read 32, 64 and 128 beeing recommended at the OCZ forums!?

Tried 128 (Vertex 120Gb) on my Lenovo T61 laptop and all it can manage is about 120 mb/s under Windows 7....

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Check if your lappy controller is really SATA2. My ICH10R was bottlenecking me at 166Mb until I enabled RAID mode and writeback cache.

My Results With 2x30gb Raid0 on ICH10R as Follows:
Attachment 96288

Attachment 96289

:eek:

How would the vertex drives run on a ICH9R in raid 0. Is it worth trying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by caRpetbomBer

How would the vertex drives run on a ICH9R in raid 0. Is it worth trying.

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It should have the same performance compared to that of a Raid 0 setup on the ICH10R.:yepp:

Wow, the results from the OCZ forum are very impressive....though I get a tad bit of diarrhea in my pants just looking at what I have to do to flash these things. 1 drive at a time....preferably in an xp32 environment, but I have vista64, compatibility mode will work according to tony.

If I don't post results after 2 hours, then you know something very bad happened.

lol :eek:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Orangeblast

Wow, the results from the OCZ forum are very impressive....though I get a tad bit of diarrhea in my pants just looking at what I have to do to flash these things. 1 drive at a time....preferably in an xp32 environment, but I have vista64, compatibility mode will work according to tony.

If I don't post results after 2 hours, then you know something very bad happened.

lol :eek:

---

I have to agree, I am glad OCZ customers seem to now be getting the spec'd speeds of the drives they purchased. The firmware update process does seem a bit involved for the average user, but hopefully it's not as delicate as it seems to be.

The new firmware looks better than I thought it was going to. Guess that's what happens when you take the time to do things right-

Still waiting on those new Reviews... what's goin on?

Oh, and how about some crystal mark, or even PCMark Vantage scores? I haven't seen a single PCMark Vantage score for the Vertex drives yet.. Maybe some MFT as well. Why aren't you guys posting those?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Griff805

Oh, and how about some crystal mark, or even PCMark Vantage scores? I haven't seen a single PCMark Vantage score for the Vertex drives yet.. Maybe some MFT as well. Why aren't you guys posting those?

---

I will when I get the drive next week hopefully :p: Damn newegg takes like a week+ to get up here though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by caRpetbomBer

How would the vertex drives run on a ICH9R in raid 0. Is it worth trying.

---

yes !

Okay, I'm back....even though I was lazy and didn't come right after the update. I ran some benchies, take a look:

2x30GB Vertex SSDs with the latest firmware update.

128 Stripe RAID0 w/ 128 Offset (alignment)

screen shot is crappy, but I'm tired, its late:

Need some advice,

I have a Rampage extreme2 and a Lsi 3 Gb/s, SAS, 8-port Adapter, i currently use this adapter with my two hp 15k sas drives in raid0. I want to upgrade to two 120gb vertex drives and put them in raid0. My question is should i use the on board controller from my rampage extreme or the lsi sas controller.

Here are the specs of my of card
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/prod...2er/index.html

P.s Will two Vertex drives in raid0 be faster then two of these in raid0? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822332008

Thanks for the help

Reviews are hard to find like legs on a snake! :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by F@32

Flashing instructions - follow closely, I thought I bricked my drive when attempted ACHI mode.

---

Is this for Vista 32/64 or only for Windows XP new firmware? Confused a bit :confused:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lu(ky

Is this for Vista 32/64 or only for Windows XP new firmware? Confused a bit :confused:

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This is Vista and XP (see Tony's updates if it runs under x64). Make sure to do 1 drive at a time, switch ICH10R to IDE mode - remove RAID, remove any overclocks to be safe. DOS version will be coming soon.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by modboxx

Need some advice,

I have a Rampage extreme2 and a Lsi 3 Gb/s, SAS, 8-port Adapter, i currently use this adapter with my two hp 15k sas drives in raid0. I want to upgrade to two 120gb vertex drives and put them in raid0. My question is should i use the on board controller from my rampage extreme or the lsi sas controller.

Here are the specs of my of card
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/prod...2er/index.html

P.s Will two Vertex drives in raid0 be faster then two of these in raid0? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822332008

Thanks for the help

---

It all depends on controller and its firmware, here's Tony's Adaptec 2405 and RAID0 with 2x Vertex drives.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...1&d=1236953078

Well I did 15Gb Empire Total War install in 4min 19sec, while having three Firefox tabs open and internet radio streaming - no hickups.

I´m using a single 60GB vertex on my system in specs. So far very pleased. What kind of real world performance would I get if I bought another and put them in raid0? How many boot seconds would I be able to cut of approximately?

*** Some folks are reporting possible stability problems with the new firmware. You may want to hold off - especially since there's potentially a lot of work involved.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Griff805

The new firmware looks better than I thought it was going to. Guess that's what happens when you take the time to do things right-

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Brahmzy

*** Some folks are reporting possible stability problems with the new firmware. You may want to hold off - especially since there's potentially a lot of work involved.

---

Lol, guess I spoke too soon-

My experiences are the opposites to what you are saying, had a hell to get my system to boot before firmware update. Tried about 10-15 times with ide, raid and switching sata cables without luck. After firmware upgrade everything went smooth.

OK I think I'll wait and see what Q3 will bring us.
Hopefully at least a clearer picture what is what and who is who in SSD.

To much fiddling around and beta testing for my pocket...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rhys

It seems convenient that because the x25 'Learns' usage patterns, the drive was wiped after each benchmark. This would have also prevented the reviewer from discovering the degradation problem.
Intel say they can't replicate PCper results! Not sure I believe that.

---

Basically a benchmark fragments the hell out of an SDD drive and it can do it extremely quickly (within minutes benchmark results can start to drop off), but the drive will eventually recover depending on stability of future usage patterns. Read, writes and IOPS are all adversely affected by fragmentation..... and the best way to deliberately fragment your drive is to run benchmarks.

Bottom line seems to be don't benchmark unless you want to slow down your drive until it can calibrate itself again, which can be a very slow process (hence Intel's guidance to reviewers to format after each benchmark). Benchmarks would appear to be totally useless unless run on a formated non OS based SSD. I guess this is the same for an OCZ drive, but maybe to a lesser extent as an Intel controller works differently.

From Intel:

SSDs all have what is known as an “Indirection System” – aka an LBA allocation table (similar to an OS file allocation table). LBAs are not typically stored in the same physical location each time they are written. If you write LBA 0, it may go to physical location 0, but if you write it again later, it may go to physical location 50, or 8.567 million, or wherever. Because of this, all SSDs performance will vary over time and settle to some steady state value. Our SSD dynamically adjusts to the incoming workload to get the optimum performance for the workload. This takes time. Other lower performing SSDs take less time as they have less complicated systems. HDDs take no time at all because their systems are fixed logical to physical systems, so their performance is immediately deterministic for any workload IOMeter throws at them.

The Intel ® Performance MLC SSD is architected to provide the optimal user experience for client PC applications, however, the performance SSD will adapt and optimize the SSD’s data location tables to obtain the best performance for any specific workload. This is done to provide the ultimate in a user experience, however provides occasional challenges in obtaining consistent benchmark testing results when changing from one specific benchmark to another, or in benchmark tests not running with sufficient time to allow stabilization. If any benchmark is run for sufficient time, the benchmark scores will eventually approach a steady state value, however, the time to reach such a steady state is heavily dependant on the previous usage case. Specifically, highly random heavy write workloads or periodic hot spot heavy write workloads (which appear random to the SSD) will condition the SSD into a state which is uncharacteristic of a client PC usage, and require longer usages in characteristic workloads before adapting to provide the expected performance.

When following a benchmark test or IOMeter workload that has put the drive into this state which is uncharacteristic of client usage, it will take significant usage time under the new workload conditions for the drive to adapt to the new workload, and therefore provide inconsistent (and likely low) benchmark results for that and possibly subsequent tests, and can occasionally cause extremely long latencies. The old HDD concept of defragmentation applies but in new ways. Standard windows defragmentation tools will not work.

SSD devices are not aware of the files written within, but are rather only aware of the Logical Block Addresses (LBAs) which contain valid data. Once data is written to a Logical Block Address (LBA), the SSD must now treat that data as valid user content and never throw it away, even after the host “deletes” the associated file. Today, there is no ATA protocol available to tell the SSDs that the LBAs from deleted files are no longer valid data. This fact, coupled with highly random write testing, leaves the drive in an extremely fragmented state which is optimized to provide the best performance possible for that random workload. Unfortunately, this state will not immediately result in characteristic user performance in client benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage, etc. without significant usage (writing) in typical client applications allowing the drive to adapt (defragment) back to a typical client usage condition.

Hey guys,

sorry I didn't get around to posting benches of the 60GB and 120GB Vertex, too much hassle getting the respective rigs up and running and finally out to my customers.
I do have a direct comparison with previous Jmicron-based MLC drives w/o cache, and let me tell you, Vertex is an entirely different story. No stuttering, awesome read and very good write performance, program installs are smooth as butter, and I had no trouble un-indexing the OS drive while simultaneously installing a driver, listening to music and browsing the SSD - previous MLCs would ALWAYS stutter and freeze while doing so.

On a darker note, the ATTO and HDTach benches I did of the 120GB Vertex on a ICH10R weren't that great. HDTach showed a flawless constant 230MB/s read, but a fluctuating and very unstable write performance of about 60-95MB/s averaging in around 75MB/s.
ATTO showed 80MB write/180MB read on average, starting at about 32k. Now I am sorry I didn't save those, I just didn't have the time. I guess the Firmware was finally optimized to highly favour IOPS, not transfer rates.

Regardless of those benching issues I can recommend the vertex to anyone who wants a smooth and fast SSD.

One other interesting fact to you may be that both drives came pre-partitioned. I guess OCZ aligned those partitions with optimal values, so I didn't erase the partitions but kept them. I tried aligning one older Core SSD via the diskpar method documented in the OCZ forums, but it didn't work (partition was created but disk manager threw errors while trying to format the partition, saying it can't be done. Likewise I couldn't install Windows on the diskpar-created partition).

So you can imagine I was pretty glad those were correctly pre-partitioned :)

So far my experiences of the drive and ATTO benchmarks indicate that there's a huge difference between not just the firmwares, but different controllers, configurations and chipset drivers. I do realise that ATTO is not a great benchmark for comparing one system against another, or one drive against another, but it does seem to be a good way to compare the same drive on the same system against different configurations.

Sadly what it seems to be is yet more confirmation that there's utterly no point in comparing SSDs against each other unless it's done on the same system, with the same Windows image, and each SSD is tweaked etc with the right drivers etc...

^^^^

Can you even get three consistent benchmarks in quick concession on the same set up? I haven't tried it but I'd bet not. Each benchmark is fragmenting the drive and slowing down read/ write and IOPS and in addition the results are likely to be variable depending on prior usage patterns.

Benchmarking on an OS drive is also going to throw out results. (I seem to recall OCZ saying you need to benchmark on a non OS drive for accurate results).

Benchmarking seems to be the best way to cripple your SSD drive performance and get useless results in the process.

This is my single 120gb with the original firmware and the new 1199 FW. This was with the offset at 512, 256 and 512 seem to be about the same and 128 has about the same writes but lower reads.

original
http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p...81/512secb.jpg

1199 FW
http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p...apImage3kh.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by audienceofone

^^^^

Can you even get three consistent benchmarks in quick concession on the same set up? I haven't tried it but I'd bet not. Each benchmark is fragmenting the drive and slowing down read/ write and IOPS and in addition the results are likely to be variable depending on prior usage patterns.

Benchmarking on an OS drive is also going to throw out results. (I seem to recall OCZ saying you need to benchmark on a non OS drive for accurate results).

Benchmarking seems to be the best way to cripple your SSD drive performance and get useless results in the process.

---

I can get similar results. Have a look at this thread where I'm mucking about with different BIOS SATA modes. The results are not identical, but you can see a theme.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Halk

I can get similar results. Have a look at this thread where I'm mucking about with different BIOS SATA modes. The results are not identical, but you can see a theme.

---

Try 3-5 benchmarks on the same setup just to see consistency- I think that's what he was after-

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dr.Leary

I´m using a single 60GB vertex on my system in specs. So far very pleased. What kind of real world performance would I get if I bought another and put them in raid0? How many boot seconds would I be able to cut of approximately?

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Haha, well, you'd actually add time to your boot sequence due to RAID initiation ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Griff805

Try 3-5 benchmarks on the same setup just to see consistency- I think that's what he was after-

---

You can get consistent results by following this order: set-up the drive -> bench ->write zeros -> set-up the drive -> bench. It's not possible otherwise.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Halk

I can get similar results. Have a look at this thread where I'm mucking about with different BIOS SATA modes. The results are not identical, but you can see a theme.

---

Halk, was it the AMD drivers/ AHCI mode or was it fragmentation that changed your results?

I'd suggest that unless you format after each test you will not get proper results because benchmarking adversely fragments all SDD drives. Maybe you get a ball park idea, maybe not.

For a valid benchmark you need a formatted non OS drive, otherwise you are just testing how badly you have fragmented your drive.

I can't understand why anyone would want to cripple the performance of an OS based SDD by benchmarking (assuming they are not formatting afterwards)......it's a lot of money to spend to then loose performance by pointlessly fragmenting it.

It would be worth asking the guys over at the OCZ forum for their opinion on how long it takes their drives to recalibrate after a test if you don't format. That would enable people to decide if they should be benchmarking or not on drives they are using for their OS.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by audienceofone

Halk, was it the AMD drivers/ AHCI mode or was it fragmentation that changed your results?

I'd suggest that unless you format after each test you will not get proper results because benchmarking adversely fragments all SDD drives. Maybe you get a ball park idea, maybe not.

For a valid benchmark you need a formatted non OS drive, otherwise you are just testing how badly you have fragmented your drive.

I can't understand why anyone would want to cripple the performance of an OS based SDD by benchmarking (assuming they are not formatting afterwards)......it's a lot of money to spend to then loose performance by pointlessly fragmenting it.

It would be worth asking the guys over at the OCZ forum for their opinion on how long it takes their drives to recalibrate after a test if you don't format. That would enable people to decide if they should be benchmarking or not on drives they are using for their OS.

---

It was AHCI + AMD drivers together that caused the performance drops. If I run in either IDE mode, or AHCI without AMD drivers then the ATTO scores are pretty much the same. Running ATTO doesn't seem to degrade performance. I think you're maybe overreacting to the effect benchmarks have on the drive. Someone had a figure of 50GB writes per day for 16 years before the drives "run out". I don't know if that's true or not, but I suspect a couple of dozen ATTO runs will be neither here nor there.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Halk

It was AHCI + AMD drivers together that caused the performance drops. If I run in either IDE mode, or AHCI without AMD drivers then the ATTO scores are pretty much the same. Running ATTO doesn't seem to degrade performance. I think you're maybe overreacting to the effect benchmarks have on the drive. Someone had a figure of 50GB writes per day for 16 years before the drives "run out". I don't know if that's true or not, but I suspect a couple of dozen ATTO runs will be neither here nor there.

---

I don't have an OCZ drive so I can't test it to find out, but logic says that benchmarking will fragment the drive. Why not give it a try or ask OCZ what it is doing to the drive?

EDIT: It's not about the drive "running out" it's about the way that SDD's relocate data after a benchmark, which is causing the slow down. The PC Perspective review has already shown how badly benchmark performances are affected on the X25-M drive. The post I made with the extract from the Intel statement is explaining why that it happening. Maybe OCZ drives are not affected as badly in terms of how long they take to adapt back, but I think it is safe to say that benchmarking is not doing an SSD drive any short/ mid term favours if you continue to use it without formatting.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dr.Leary

I´m using a single 60GB vertex on my system in specs. So far very pleased. What kind of real world performance would I get if I bought another and put them in raid0? How many boot seconds would I be able to cut of approximately?

---

IMO.....you don't need raid O to get more (tangible) performance out of Intel or the Vertex drives.


Hard raid with cache was only a benefit to earlier OCZ drives models that stuttered, but that does not seem to be the case with the Vertex.


The problem with hard raid is they are geared to HDD, they have not had chance to adapt to target high-speed random data in small chunks. Consequently performance of an SDD may even be reduced.


The only benefit of hard raid 0 is additional capacity. The down sides are very long boot times, heat, power consumption & added latency.


I use hard raid and raid 0 but I do that for capacity and imo hard raid gives more stability over soft raid, but I came to that conclusion before I switched to SSD. If I did not need capacity I would not be using raid 0.

audienceofone thats exaly what eye have been seeing with my set up hard or soft raid , think will keep the hard card till eye get 2 more drives and re test

probbly end up selling it lol

I have a hardware RAID card arriving in the next few hours which is for the 4 WD RE3 1TB drives I bought last week. They'll be going into RAID5. I'll probably buy another Vertex drive and whack that on there too. I noticed better performance on a hybrid (cheap) RAID card, the 1430SA than I did on the motherboard. I've also noticed that people running 2 or 3 Vertex drives on RAID seem to get better performance than just double the single drive performance on the low numbers on ATTO. I suspect this is somewhat down to cache, but maybe also down to the drives supporting RAID but not AHCI. I don't expect to see spectacular gains under RAID0, but I think there will be gains. 60GB is just a little too small for an OS drive though. Currently I've got less than 30GB, but as I add apps and games etc it'll get very close to 60GB, and I'd rather have plenty of space.

As for performance degradation, I've noticed my write speeds had gone down from about 150MB/sec to around 110MB/sec after I had installed stuff to take it up to 40GB - I was really just filling the drive up. Repeating the same benchmark didn't decrease the write speeds, but that may have been because I hadn't written to the whole drive by that point. I probably have now. I've cleared stuff back down and I'll see if the performance stays the same or goes back up - and as I type ATTO is running, I'm capping out at 120MB/sec on writes, reads are unaffected.

A guy from PerfectDisk has been on the OCZ forums talking about defragging, and Tony has mentioned (but avoided any detail) some kind of OCZ software to enhance performance. It would seem to me that what we want is some kind of defragmentation/maintenance routine that erases any areas of the disk that the OS has marked as deleted. I think that'll come in the near future, either through third party defrag tools or through OCZ. Even with performance degraded though the results are better with the new firmware on an OS drive than they were with the old firmware on an empty non-OS drive.

^^^^
Is the issue not how much valid data is showing but how full the drive is with "deleted" data? A 30/ 60GB drive is soon going to be "full" after an OS install along with a few basic programs due to the temporary files that are written in the process.

That is one issue. How the drives fragment is another. From what you are saying ATTO benchmarks are consistent on your Vertex, so it would seem that the Vertex is not affected as is the case with Intel drives, but I find that a little surprising.

EDIT: What happens if you run multiple Iometer or Crystal benchmarks thattake cache out of the equation? Do you get consistent results?

EDIT: Let's not forget that ATTO did not give a true reflection of the user experience performance of the Core's. It didn't give any indication that the drive could potentially stutter. That is the prime reason for me to believe that ATTO is useless for giving any form of validation on how an SSD is going to perform in real world usage.

EDIT: OCz's web site states: **Rated speeds are based on NVIDIA 680i chipset and may vary slightly dependent on the benchmark used, drivers, windows version, bios version and file size. We recommend using ATTO and PC Mark Vantage for benchmarking SSDs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Halk

I've also noticed that people running 2 or 3 Vertex drives on RAID seem to get better performance than just double the single drive performance on the low numbers on ATTO. I suspect this is somewhat down to cache

---

It is entirely due to cache. As soon as they turn cache off in ICHXR their small numbers go back to normal.

Hi there, so, I was thinking, which one would be better, OCZ Vertex or OCZ Apex? According to the specs the Apex is better (Well, looks like), but I am seeing a lot of good results with the Vertex.

Thanks!

vertex by a large margin.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by One_Hertz

vertex by a large margin.

---

True, stay away from JMicrons even in internal RAID config. Titan/Apex - same thing. It's either vertex or Intel/Samsung SLC/MLC at the moment.

Still no pcmark vantage scores? Anyone? Single drive or RAID-

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by F@32

You can get consistent results by following this order: set-up the drive -> bench ->write zeros -> set-up the drive -> bench. It's not possible otherwise.

---

QFT. Benchmarks kill the short/ midterm performance of SSD and if you don't follow the above you are wasting your time. This has now been well documented on the OCZ forum.

It makes a joke of the scaremongering PC Perspective review on the X25-M. I have since found out that the quote from Intel on my earlier post was not in response to the PC Perspective review it was information available at the release of their drives, which kind of makes me wonder where they were coming from and what they were trying to prove.

PC Perspective failed to demonstrate anything more than a drop in benchmark performance, which if they had done their homework is hardly a revelation. So is there a perceivable drop is user performance after fragmenting an SSD with benchmarks? Not on my X25-E, but considering that it is designed for server applications that is not really surprising. I doubt that the X-25-M or Vertex are affected either, however reading the PC Perspective review it seems that the benchmarks they undertook were instigated by this statement "Once the newness wore off and I got some hours logged with it, I discovered that my speedy SSD had lost some of its luster." That statement would seem to imply that they had noticed a drop in perceivable speed in normal use (within hours).....but who knows? If they had been talking about the X25-E in server applications they might have been on to something, but they were talking about the X25-M on a workstation. Considering the damage they must have done to Intel I'm surprised they haven't been more forthcoming with a more robust response.

Do benchmarks pointlessly wear out the SSD as well as give useless results if you don't follow the advice above? Yes, which is obviously more of an issue on MLC.

Duplicated by error.....Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a severe slow down on this site since they went SSD last week? :rofl:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Griff805

Still no pcmark vantage scores? Anyone? Single drive or RAID-

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Single 60GB

http://halk.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pcmark%20vantage.png

HDD : 20107

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by audienceofone

QFT. Benchmarks kill the short/ midterm performance of SSD and if you don't follow the above you are wasting your time. This has now been well documented on the OCZ forum.

It makes a joke of the scaremongering PC Perspective review on the X25-M. I have since found out that the quote from Intel on my earlier post was not in response to the PC Perspective review it was information available at the release of their drives, which kind of makes me wonder where they were coming from and what they were trying to prove.

PC Perspective failed to demonstrate anything more than a drop in benchmark performance, which if they had done their homework is hardly a revelation. So is there a perceivable drop is user performance after fragmenting an SSD with benchmarks? Not on my X25-E, but considering that it is designed for server applications that is not really surprising. I doubt that the X-25-M or Vertex are affected either, however reading the PC Perspective review it seems that the benchmarks they undertook were instigated by this statement "Once the newness wore off and I got some hours logged with it, I discovered that my speedy SSD had lost some of its luster." That statement would seem to imply that they had noticed a drop in perceivable speed in normal use (within hours).....but who knows? If they had been talking about the X25-E in server applications they might have been on to something, but they were talking about the X25-M on a workstation. Considering the damage they must have done to Intel I'm surprised they haven't been more forthcoming with a more robust response.

Do benchmarks pointlessly wear out the SSD as well as give useless results if you don't follow the advice above? Yes, which is obviously more of an issue on MLC.

---

After doing multiple Lowish Level re-formats and swiss cheesing my drives until my benchmarks at one point were less than half of what they were, I noticed XP startup took 0.5 bars extra to load. There was no perceivable difference though once in OS.
:shrug:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rhys

After doing multiple Lowish Level re-formats and swiss cheesing my drives until my benchmarks at one point were less than half of what they were, I noticed XP startup took 0.5 bars extra to load. There was no perceivable difference though once in OS.
:shrug:

---

So no need to lend you my Intel crutches? ;)

Let me clarify the point about the X25-E in server applications. The X25-E is sold for server applications. It's selling point is IOPS. In a server application an Iometer benchmark is reflecting server use, so it is relevant to server applications.

If an Iometer benchmark is causing a drop in IOPS that is a problem for Intel, but it is still unclear how the X25-E is performing long term in server applications.

Rhys, my choice to get an X25-E for a workstation was 1, because it is SLC, 2, because I didn't want to risk anything less than that top level performance having previously purchased a Core. I don't regret that decision one bit and would do it again given the chance. (My logic, flawed other otherwise.... 10 Ford's might cost the same as a Rolls Royce but you don't end up with a Rolls Royce with the money spent on 10 Ford's.)

Not to unpset anyone....I'm not implying the Vertex is a Ford, it wasn't available when I got the X25-E. That said I would still get the X25-E if I had the choice, but that is just my opinion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Halk

Single 60GB

HDD : 20107

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A bit slow? Should be ~24k?

Edit: lol vantage is so screwy, just ran it and it gave me 1200mb/s for the media test. Seems to be influenced by cache.

I've got a live OS with games, and I've been benchmarking a fair bit :)
Currently I'm seeing if PerfectDisk and Diskeeper can sort things out. I'm noticing performance comes back after a reboot. I'm not sure if it's just the case that the reboot does it, or if "defrag" benefits come after a reboot.