OCZ SSD 64GB ‘Core series’ Solid State Disk

Win AVI Video Conversion
 
The transcoding of video files between different formats for use on devices such as portable media players or burning to DVD is becoming increasingly common in today’s digital world. While the method of conversion is largely CPU intensive, it requires a fast hard disk to keep up with the stream of data. For this stage of the testing we used a 600mb Xvid encoded AVI file placed on each of the hard disks and then used WinAVI to transcode the file into DVD format. The time taken was recorded with a stop watch.
 
 
 
Peazip File Compression

File compression/Decompression is yet another area where the system is just as reliant on the performance of the CPU as it is on the hard drive. To simulate the compression of various types of files, a folder containing a collection of 200 text documents filled with random contents and file sizes varying from 1KB to 100MB was copied to each of the hard disks. This folder was then compressed and decompressed using a utility called Peazip which provided us with an accurate “time taken” reading.

 
 
  
 
 
 
Dummy File Creation

When performing manual “file copy” benchmarks, the performance of the drive that the files are being copied from can directly and negatively affect the results of the drive they are being copied to. This is something that needs to be taken into consideration when benchmarking high performance hard disks such as the OCZ SSD as it’s performance easily exceeds that of a standard hard disk. Therefore, to test the write performance of each storage device a freeware utility called Dummy File Creator was used to generate files directly to each of the hard disks removing the possibility of any bottlenecks.

 
The results below show how long each of the drives took to write 20GB of files with sizes ranging from 1MB to 1GB.
 
  
As the results show, the Core series is slower than all the hard drives tested and by a significant margin. This is a very disappointing show from the Core Series SSD as I not only expected it to be faster than the Velociraptor but at the very least better than  the OCZ SSD previously reviewed. Sadly on this occasion it was neither, being soundly beaten by both versions of conventional hard drives from Western Digital and also by it’s older brother, the OCZ SSD.Â