OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS & Patriot Wildfire SSDs Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2011 4:35 AM ESTA Note on Real World Performance
The majority of our SSD test suite is focused on I/O bound tests. These are benchmarks that intentionally shift the bottleneck to the SSD and away from the CPU/GPU/memory subsystem in order to give us the best idea of which drives are the fastest. Unfortunately, as many of you correctly point out, these numbers don't always give you a good idea of how tangible the performance improvement is in the real world.
Some of them do. Our 128KB sequential read/write tests as well as the ATTO and AS-SSD results give you a good indication of large file copy performance. Our small file random read/write tests tell a portion of the story for things like web browser cache accesses, but those are difficult to directly relate to experiences in the real world.
So why not exclusively use real world performance tests? It turns out that although the move from a hard drive to a decent SSD is tremendous, finding differences between individual SSDs is harder to quantify in a single real world metric. Take application launch time for example. I stopped including that data in our reviews because the graphs ended up looking like this:
All of the SSDs performed the same. It's not just application launch times though. Here is data from our Chrome Build test timing how long it takes to compile the Chromium project:
Even going back two generations of SSDs, at the same capacity nearly all of these drives perform within a couple of percent of one another. Note that the Vertex 3 is even a 6Gbps drive and doesn't even outperform its predecessor.
So do all SSDs perform the same then? The answer there is a little more complicated. As I mentioned at the start of this review, I do long term evaluation of all drives I recommend in my own personal system. If a drive is particularly well recommended I'll actually hand out drives for use in the systems of other AnandTech editors. For example, back when I wanted to measure actual write amplification on SandForce drives I sent three Vertex 2s to three different AnandTech editors. I had them use the drives normally for two - three months and then looked at the resulting wear on the NAND.
In doing these real world use tests I get a good feel for when a drive is actually faster or slower than another. My experiences typically track with the benchmark results but it's always important to feel it first hand. What I've noticed is that although single tasks perform very similarly on all SSDs, it's during periods of heavy I/O activity that you can feel the difference between drives. Unfortunately these periods of heavy I/O activity aren't easily measured, at least in a repeatable fashion. Getting file copies, compiles, web browsing, application launches, IM log updates and searches to all start at the same time while properly measuring overall performance is near impossible without some sort of automated tool. Unfortunately most system-wide benchmarks are more geared towards CPU or GPU performance and as a result try to minimize the impact of I/O.
The best we can offer is our Storage Bench suite. In those tests we are actually playing back the I/O requests captured of me using a PC over a long period of time. While all other bottlenecks are excluded from the performance measurement, the source of the workload is real world in nature.
What you have to keep in mind is that a performance advantage in our Storage Bench suite isn't going to translate linearly into the same overall performance impact on your system. Remember these are I/O bound tests, so a 20% increase in your Heavy 2011 score is going to mean that the drive you're looking at will be 20% faster in that particular type of heavy I/O bound workload. Most desktop PCs aren't under that sort of load constantly, so that 20% advantage may only be seen 20% of the time. The rest of the time your drive may be no quicker than a model from last year.
The point of our benchmarks isn't to tell you that only the newest SSDs are fast, but rather to show you the best performing drive at a given price point. The best values in SSDs are going to be last year's models without a doubt. I'd say that the 6Gbps drives are interesting mostly for the folks that do a lot of large file copies, but for most general use you're fine with an older drive. Almost any SSD is better than a hard drive (almost) and as long as you choose a good one you won't regret the jump.
I like the SF-2281 series because, despite things like the BSOD issues, SandForce has put a lot more development and validation time into this controller than its predecessor. Even Intel's SSD 320 is supposed to be more reliable than the X25-M G2 that came before it. Improvements do happen from one generation to the next but they're evolutionary - they just aren't going to be as dramatic as the jump from a hard drive to an SSD.
So use these numbers for what they tell you (which drive is the fastest) but keep in mind that a 20% advantage in an I/O bound scenario isn't going to mean that your system is 20% faster in all cases.
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poohbear - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Thank you for being upfront at the very beginning about "the elephant in the room"! some sites were blamed for ignoring the issue, but u guys were spot on about it and to be honest its one of the main reason i've been steering clear of any Sandforce 2000 based SSDs. two thirds of a percent? why give it in such a complicated way???? two thirds of a percent is .6% of all drives? why not just say 1% of all drives, but yea i understand disgruntled consumers are often the most vocal about a problem.Nice review though, might look into this when they have some new and more mature firmwares. Right now im fine with my Crucial C300 64gb.^^
bivoy - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
strange, my A DATA SSD 599 (sandforce 1XXX based) has died two weeks ago when I left notebook in sleep mode overnight .......iron11 - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
After reading many reviews of OCZ, I went ahead and bought 2 of them. Let me tell you.. 2 months of owning these SSD's... BSOD's over and over and over and over again. Look at OCZ forums and tell me that its a 1% failure rate. I really hope anyone who's thinking of buying these SSD's look into Intel 510/320's. They're reliability/speed is there. I will never buy OCZ again.. i'll pay the extra surcharge fee Intel charges. I'll pay it not for the name.. but the track record behind Intel's SSD.OCZ = Bad
seapeople - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
As explained in this article, the OCZ BSOD issue is not a reliability issue whereby drives degrade in quality and "break", but rather a compatibility issue with certain system configurations. If your system is incompatible with the Sandforce-based drive for an as-yet undetermined reason, then EVERY similar Sandforce-based drive will give you BSOD's. This explains why there are such conflicting reviews of these drives: reviewers like Anand can put dozens of these drives into a few different systems, and because none of these systems have a compatibility issue the drives work perfectly. Meanwhile the people who do have a system-compatibility issue can RMA a dozen of these drives and every single one of them will fail.It sounds like if you take on of these BSOD drives out of a user's system and put it in a different system it will work perfectly, which is part of why OCZ is having such trouble diagnosing the issue.
All that said, I'm glad I bought an Intel.
spidey81 - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
I was curious to see current pricing and availability after reading this article and found a little surprise. When Anand spoke about the price premium not being worth the jump up to the MAX IOPS from the base V3 I wanted to look myself and see what they were going for or if there were any deals. What I came across was a Corsair Force 3 for $180 after rebate ( $210 without ). This is the drive mentioned in the first page of that article that Corsair recently recalled. But the problem has been addressed and this seems like a hell of a deal!Beenthere - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
As we see with many PC products these days, many are shipped well before they are ready for primetime. Sure those who only use their PC for games might be willing to buy unreliable, half-baked products but no one with a clue would touch these unreliable products. As long as the sheep line up to pay a premium for the half-baked product of the week, manufacturers will continue to ship half-baked crap and there are numerous popular brands who routinely do this as noted by the product defect reports.Axonn - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
I think Anand forgot to mention another reason why the V3 MI is worth it: 32nm NAND means it has more life cycles in it.Impulses - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Honestly, how many times have we as enthusiasts encountered a particular motherboard (even on a business class laptop) that didn't play will with a certain brand of RAM or vice versa, or a GPU that was unstable on certain platforms, etc etc. When you're a DIY enthusiast this comes with the territory... There's always gonna be some products/brands that are more reliable, if you value your time a lot then opt for those.I don't see anything wrong with AT's coverage as is, he has ALWAYS mentioned that Sandforce drives pose a reliability risk (vs Intel) in the same breath that he talks about their performance... If you visit message boards this has always been quite obvious. If anything I'd just hope for a quicker mention of some of the emerging issues.
I understand Anand can't document something he hasn't experienced and I imagine getting info from OCZ is hard when they haven't been able to pin down the problem, but still, an earlier warning that there might be a very real issue would be good (regardless of how uncommon).
npp - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
The current prices of the third generation Vertex drives here in Germany:OCZ Vertex 3 240GB: 198,51€ (MAXIOPS Version: 247,50€)
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB: 422,68€ (MAXIOPS Version: 485,98€)
If you want the prices in USD, do the math for yourself, but one thing is clear, those don't come cheap.
Personally, I wouldn't bother spending so much money on a drive with *known* issues. It's plain unreasonable. A 300GB Intel 320 drive costs 429€ around here, so you get the point. Sure, it's a "last gen" drive and slower on paper per se, but I'm sure even Anand will be hard pressed to tell the difference from a Vertex 3 in real life.
OCZ played it really when with the second-gen Vertex, but I think they got a bit of an overshoot this time. Given how fast SSD are to begin with, I would be perfectly fine with more incremental changes between generations, if that means better reliability. Going for the big figures and then getting BSODs isn't the right way to do things, I think. Issues such as those still hold me back from getting a SSD in my notebook. I typically use a system for about 3 years before upgrading, and I want a drive that will cut it through all that time without a glitch. Given that even Intel messes things up occasionally, I wonder when such a drive will make it to market.
Makaveli - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
"There's a percentage of OCZ Vertex 3/Agility 3 customers that have a recurring stuttering/instability issue."This is unacceptable on a storage device that will host an operating system, I don't care if this thing pushes 1 million ops and takes out the garbage.
And still the reason I only look at intel drives for ssd.
Stability > speed when it comes to storage devices.