OCZ SSD 64GB ‘Core series’ Solid State Disk

Test Setup
 
As previously mentioned, OCZ generously sent us the Core Series SSD in the hope of finally persuading us, and therefore you, that the OCZ SSD 64GB Core series drive is a better solution than a conventional drive. We already know it is both smaller, quieter and more energy efficient that it’s mechanical rivals but is it faster? To find this out we decided to pitch it against it’s stable mate, the standard OCZ SSD and both the Western Digital RaptorX as well as the current speed champ, the Western Digital Velociraptor.
 
 
The blank scores for the solid state drives are too low to measure accurately as the speed would be in nanoseconds, so you can pretty much say the speed is instant. In contrast the conventional drives, while at the very pinnacle of their own game lag behind the SSD’s by quite a margin due to their mechanical restrictions. Note that the above specifications for the OCZ Core are minimum performance. The actual figures may increase depending on the setup used i.e Read Transfer rate, OCZ claim has been tested to sustain 143 MB/s and a write time of upto 93MB/s. Those figures are certainly impressive indeed with the Core series excelling that of the WD Velociraptor in read transfer and catching up some lost ground with the write transfer speeds. Talk is cheap around here though and we trust no results but our own so without further delay lets move on to our test setup.
 
To ensure that no part of our test system would be a bottleneck to the disk drives, an Intel X48/ICH9R based motherboard was used along with a Quad Core Q6600 Intel CPU overclocked to 3.6GHZ. Intel’s latest “Inf” drivers and all Windows updates were also installed to ensure optimum performance and stability. The full system configuration can be seen below: 
 
 
 While synthetic benchmarks such as HD Tune offer a good insight into the performance of a disk drive, these figures do not always translate directly into real world performance. For this reason we selected to perform several day-to-day operations (such as file conversion and Windows startup) in addition to synthetic benchmarks. The full set of tests can be seen below:
 
Synthetic Benchmarks
HD Tune Pro 3.1.0

File Write & Manipulation
WinAVI Xvid – DVD Convert
Dummy file creation (15GB)
Peazip file compression / decompression.

OS & Gaming

Windows Vista Start-up time.
Unreal Tournament III map load time.

 
So can OCZ’s Core series live up to expectations? Lets go find out…Â