OCZ Vertex TURBO 120GB Solid State Drive

 

Most people who will be considering the upgrade to an SSD drive will likely be making the jump from one of the many ‘favourite’ mechanical hard drives. With this in mind we will be assessing the GSkill Falcons capabilities in comparison to the following drives:

 

  OCZ Vertex Turbo GSkill Falcon OCZ Summit OCZ Vertex WD Velociraptor Samsung F1 WD Caviar Black Read Seek Time 270 4.3ms 8.9ms 12.2ms Write Seek Time 4.7ms 8.9ms 12.2ms Average Latency 5.5ms 4.17ms 4.17ms Read Transfer Rate 270MB/s 230MB/s 220MB/s 250MB/s 120MB/s 175MB/s 106MB/s Write Transfer Rate 200MB/s 190MB/s 200MB/s 180MB/s 120MB/s 175MB/s 106MB/s Capacity 128GB 128GB 250GB 120GB 300GB 1TB 750GB Cache 64MB 64MB 128MB 64MB 16MB 32MB 32MB

• Superfetch: Off
• Indexing: Off
• Search indexing: Off
• Defrag: Off 
• SATA Mode in BIOS was set to IDE for all hard disks
• Drive was formatted with a 4096 cluster size
• Enable Enhanced Performance was selected in device manager for all hard disks

While synthetic benchmarks such as HDTune offer a good insight into the performance of a mechanical disk drive, these figures do not always translate directly into real world performance, this is especially so for Solid State Drives. For the purposes of comparison to some of our previous reviews though I have included a couple of screenshots of the GSkill Falcons performance here although these should be taken with a pinch of salt due to the sporadic nature of HDTune Pro in testing SSD’s:

 

 

HDTune showed some excellent read and write speeds almost hiiting 200MB/s. However when you consider that the read speed of the Vertex Turbo is advertised at 270MB/s, some may feel a little short changed by this result.

 

Before we get on-board with the testing, let’s also perform a run of HDTach, again not the best utility to use on SSD’s but it should give us an idea of the performance to expect and it’s perhaps the most common utility used to compare hard drives:

 

 

 

HDTach backed up what HDTune was telling us and recorded speeds well below that what was advertised. This was on a clean, pre-formated drive. I decided to format the drive again using the ‘default’ cluster size but alas the results were the same. While these results are hardly what you could call slow, if they are to be believed then they are well below the advertised 270MBs which is not good at all as this drive is barely faster than a standard Vertex according to these results. However, as previously stated, HDtune and HDTach are not the best methods to test the true speed of an SSD so we have our own suite of benchmarks to try the OCZ vertex Turbo out on.

 

Along with many other synthetic benchmarks run today, I decided to perform several day-to-day operations (such as file transfer and Windows start up) in addition to the synthetic benchmarks. The full set of tests can be seen below