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It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
The Vertex 2 recorded a time just 1 second behind the X25-M and 3 seconds behind the Raid 0 configuration. If you want to increase your boot times then this drive is certainly going to deliver the goods.
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
The Vertex 2 nicks second place in this test, right behind the X25-M which is still the fastest performing unit we have recorded to date.
OCZ have always been solid SSD drives./ that one is a bit costly though I do agree.
Great drive, good performer. awesome write performance. only issue I have is the pricing. its £300 in our local store. for 100gb? ouch.
im impressed with the performance, only concern is the cost for this performance. I am sure some people will pay it, but the intel 40gb drives seem good value, and in raid 0 outperform most drives in read performance. I know write is much slower, but it seems most people dont really notice it as much. Or am I missing the point?
nice review. outperforms most drives, but for the price, its a bit small i think. Still wouldnt mind one though 🙂
The controller is great. clearly seen in the performance figures. I have to agree with others. almost £300 for 100gb seems a lot of dosh.
I like it, cant quite afford it yet, but it will be my next SSD
sandforce controllers are mega good . all their drives are dear tho. just opart of the costs of owning this controller unit.
These are actually very hard to get in the UK right now, anyone seen them on sale anywhere?
I always like to see real world testing. Seems a solid enough drive, but OCZ are pretty much leaders in this field I think. Bit surprised with the cost however, I was expecting it to be around 200-230./ not 280-300
my friend has one of these, they are very good SSD’s. out of my price league but if I was paying this much for an SSD id go for a 256 gb and spend a bit more.
performance is great, but its not worthy of the price tag. id rather go with a raid 0 system that Zardon reviewed last week. those intel drives would be around 100 less and have more read performance. Write speeds are important for specific jobs, but for a boot OS drive it makes little to no difference.
Great ssd, but for £131.59 at Aria you can get the 50gb vertex 2, and put your OS and main programs on it, and then pick up a cheap traditional hard drive for your data. OK it’s only 50gb, but when you consider the money that can be spent on a processor to speed things up it’s not bad value at all.
I have 6 of the 50s running on different setups with an ahci minimum. If you are worried about cost per gigabyte, don’t think like that. How much was cost per gigabyte when geeks upgraded 286s from 384kb to 2 Meg back in the 80s and how much difference did that make in system speed? $20000 a gig?
These also make fiber optic cards actually go full speed as the drive is capable of doing all the IOPS. The only thing hotter than this in a modest budget are vertex 2 pro and Pcie skinny controller SSD.
Sorry for any typos.