OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA2 SSD

HD Tune Pro

HD Tune Pro is a complete hard disk benchmarking, status and erasing utility by EFD Software. Capable of benchmarking performance across 100% of the disk HDTune is especially useful for mechanical hard drives that have greater performance towards the centre of the platter. As SSD drives do not suffer from any noticeable performance degradation across the entire capacity of the disk, this makes HD Tune an excellent utility for displaying the differences in performance between the two types of media. Our testing procedure involved running both the read and write benchmark tests on each of the drives with screen shots of the results being taken at the end of each benchmark run. The results can be seen below.

In everything but the burst rate results the Vertex annihilated the competition with an average read speed of almost 100MB/s higher than the rest of the drives. Access time was also naturally good for the SSD drive with a measured speed of 0.2ms  – 7ms lower than that of the Velociraptor. Interestingly CPU usage was reported to be 1% higher for the Vertex, but this could easily be attributed to Vista running background processes.

Although slightly more erratic on the HDTune graphs, the write performance of the Vertex 120GB is simply awesome. Managing an average transfer rate of 171.4MB/s – almost double that of the Western Digital Velociraptor, it certainly looks like write performance has come a long way since we last got our hands on an OCZ SSD.

 

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark may be one of the oldest hard disk benchmark utilities still in service, but many would argue that it still remains the best. Unlike HDTune Pro and many other benchmarking utilities, ATTO can be configured to write up to 256MB of data to the disk in file sizes varying from 5KB to 8MB. This is especially useful for SSD drives and indeed RAID configurations where performance can be heavily reliant on the cluster size of the disk. All tests were run with the default settings of 0.5KB through 8192KB transfer sizes with the total length of 256MB

Starting with the writing of the 256MB file in 0.5K chunks, the Vertex falls behind the other drives by between 3-6MB/s. This defecit is soon made up however once the chunk size hits 4KB with the Vertex matching up to the other drives in the write results and flying ahead in the read results. From chunk sizes 128KB – 8192KB the Vertex performance remains quite consistent with a ~200MB write and ~230MB read speed. As with the HDTune benchmarks, this is more than 2x the speed of the Samsung F1 and Caviar Black drives and almost double that of the Velociraptor. 

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Sections in this review

Introduction Packaging & Appearance Test Setup HD Tune Pro & ATTO Results CrystalDiskMark & PCMark Vantage Dummy File Creation & Peazip Vista Startup/Shutdown & Game Loading Conclusion

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