OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD review - Comment, conclusion
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 04 Mar 2009

First, let's take care of the test that's here purely for "old time's sake" reasons - HDtach. I deliberately left out the write test results because they're completely wrong and off-base, which has been widely discussed in many other SSD reviews. In HDtach, Vertex can deliver 200MB/s transfer rate, sustainable, with a performance line almost perfectly straight. On average, that translates to 198.8MB/s average read speed, which is just mindblowing. Bare in mind that these tests were done on Vista 64-bit and in order to do so, HDtach has to be run in "compatibility" mode so some speed is lost there. As evidenced by some other scores. Random access time of 0.1ms was proven to be correct later when we did a couple of runs with Everest. Also, PCMark score of 23824 is by far the highest score ever achieved in our lab, with ease.

As a visual display of Vertex's supreme dominance, take a look at the Sandra scores. It stands way above everything in the database, by a factor of two. Compared to it, our beloved WD Raptor looks like an old guy trying to run twenty miles faster then a young guy doing marathon on a daily basis.

Moving on to ATTO and Everest. We have to admit that we still have some reserves when talking about ATTO write scores because they were often proved to be a bit off-base. At the same time, read tests have mostly been very precise so I'll comment on them without hesitation. Read performance of this hard drive is really insane. After you hit it with data >64KB, Vertex is able to transfer 220+ MB/s, sustained, peaking at around 230MB/s, which is well ABOVE the specs of this drive. To be politically correct, let's put this into raw numbers - more then 10% more then declared specs on the box (200MB/s), and getting very, very close to what's declared on OCZ's website (250MB/s). We're yet to clarify these details with OCZ people but to sum it up - it's insanely, insanely fast. And Everest Disk Benchmark scores say the same thing - Buffered read averages at 235MB/s, Random read averages at 207MB/s, and Linear Read test averages at 238MB/s. Also, I'd like to point out the fact that even in Random Read test which stresses the drive like crazy, performance rarely drops below 200MB/s. And, on top of it, it runs dead cold.

Write speeds deserve a separate section as I know a lot of readers will probably feel the need to complain about the lack of speed. So here's the breakdown. I just had a chat with SSD Master from OCZ and this is the quote I got - "Expect significant speed increases with a firmware revision coming up at the end of this week/beginning of next week as it's in the final evaluation process. Also,expect same read and write speeds for all of the drives in the series, top to bottom, 30 to 120GB models". Numbers I've heard are excellent so stay tuned and watch OCZ's SSD support forum here.

Vertex is by far the fastest drive we've had a pleasure of testing so far. It kicks ass in read performance, very low CPU usage (normal usage up to 3%, random usage up to 13% but average around 5%), and random seek time that's in the 0.1-0.11ms region. We give our kuddos to OCZ crew and award this drive with our Editor's Choice award. Well deserved, excellent work, guys!