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  • dagamer34 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Great review Anand, but a far more practical question is this, why should the average consumer get the OCZ Vertex 3 at a almost $100 street price premium when the Vertex 2 performs reasonably well in all areas that matter? Almost no regular consumer is actually going to benefit from having sustained 500MB/sec read/writes compared to 200MB/sec because you'd actually need a source/destination that can also dish out or take in data that fast. Sure, compared to a HDD, any SSD is better, but is for example loading Windows in 14 seconds as opposed to 9 seconds really worth that much.

    Of course, for business markets, all bets are off and faster is almost always better since they've got RAID arrays churning to get data access as fast as possible. One SSD can easily replace a RAID 5 Raptor array at a far lower cost.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I think for the average consumer simply making the move to an SSD is good enough. From there it's a question of subtlety. I can notice the difference on a Sandy Bridge system between a Vertex 2 and Vertex 3 - is it worth the price premium? For most users I'd say no, particularly if you aren't running a platform with a good 6Gbps controller.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • aegisofrime - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Thanks for the answer, I was wondering the same thing as well. With Vertex 2s going for cheap nowadays, I think I can settle for a Vertex 2. Thanks for all the great work Anand, Anandtech is the first site I hit when I wake up :)
  • vol7ron - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    It's good advice, but also keep in mind scalability and future-proofing.

    How long do you keep your HDs? I keep mine until failure. Even if I don't have enough SATA ports on my mobo/cards, I'll use USB transformers to make user of the drives.

    How important is it to you to buy an inferior product? To most users, it might not matter and the others might not care; but keep in mind you might use it as an external drive some day and you might want it to be able to saturate, or at least make use of the bandwidth for that external interface - think USB3/4 or Light Peak (Thunderbolt).

    That being said, "deals" are deals for a reason and there's no such thing as a bad deal, just "mistakes" and "favors."
  • Rasterman - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    That doesn't make any sense, drives can last for 10 years or more, are you really telling me you have a 50MB drive from 10 years ago that you have hooked up to a USB port sucking 10-20W down? At some point it makes more sense to consolidate and upgrade, its only a matter of time before the cost to simply power the drive isn't worth the money. Add to that error rates increase exponentially as the drive ages and your data will simply not be reliable.

    I personally get a new storage drive every 3-4 years, the old ones are re-purposed into encrypted off-site backups as they usually aren't worth anything used.
  • jharmon - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Again Anand, thank you so much for an excellent review. However, I was wondering if you could expound a bit more on this comment. I am currently running the X58 with Marvell 9128 controller. It is a sata 6Gbps interfaces, but the max bandwidth on that is 500 MB/s and it seems to be capping performance. Even OCZ warns about this on their website.

    You say you notice a different on SandyBrige, but what about the X58 platform?

    Thanks again!
  • vol7ron - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    These kinds of questions should go to the forum. Though authors/owners, do respond to some comments, the "Comments" section is not for questions, especially questions of another technology. I think they are meant for readers and users to leave comments on the article, content, or food-for-thought.
  • v8x - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    I do not agree, Who are you to decide what goes into the forums and what not? If Anand makes a statement in an article he wrote, it's not more than natural that questions on that statement go in the comments section.
    It is not a question on another technology, it's a question on a statement Anand made.
  • Hargak - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Actually, your RAM is usually the secondary device in 99% of the situations. And your RAM can receive data much faster than transferring it to another Vertex 3. Hence the improvements in loading large programs such as photoshop or big gaming programs. Whenever it is loading something you are taking data from the hard drive and caching it to RAM so the CPU can work with it in a much lower latency higher bandwidth situation. Then again, the question is whether or not the data is compressable. If it isn't then your basically back to Vertex 2 speeds. I'm also assuming in RAID 0 situations you would have a large margin of read bandwidth depending on the type of data compressable or uncompressable. I've been sold on SSD's since I found out that I could actually overclock the drive. I suggested to one of the engineers (Tony) hat they sell an overclocked version since there is headroom in added frequency. I overclocked the southbridge which made ~10% increase in performance on an old Core SSD. Down the road we may see performance SSD's possibly in card format with heatsinks and fans on them.
  • Hargak - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Forgot to mention, that's how they came up with the Vertex Turbo, ;)
  • dagamer34 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Yeah, I kinda addressed that with the fact that "should you pay $100 to boot Windows in 9 seconds instead of 14". I'm arguing the practical purpose of it, not the theoretical one.

    People don't buy SSDs for faster boot times because that's something you do only once a day. They buy them to avoid the silly 15 sec Photoshop load time and increase the general responsiveness of their system. Once you go from 6.8ms latency to 0.1ms latency, I don't see how you improve that further.
  • Omid.M - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I've noticed every time you cover SSDs that you have a recommendation for OS X that's generally different from your conclusion in the article.

    Is that the case here as well?

    How would you rank the top 3 SSDs for Macs, if each is from a different vendor? From a reliability standpoint, as I don't think the difference in speed is noticeable to the end user unless performing specific tasks:

    Intel 510 (or 320)
    Vertex 3
    Crucial C300

    What do you think, Anand?

    @moids
  • purrcatian - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Macs don't support TRIM. There aren't too many high performance SSDs with which you can get away with using them without TRIM and expect long term speed. SandForce controllers have always been good at working without TRIM, so the Vertex 3 would likely be your best bet.

    The Marvel controllers in the Crucial C300 and Intel 510 are know for not working too well without TRIM, so they wouldn't be a good choice for a Mac.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    If you've got a Mac with a 6Gbps interface, then the Vertex 3 240GB is a solid recommendation. Note that some users have had issues with the 2011 MBPs and Vertex 3s but personally I've lucked out. I suspect there may be some odd issues with Apple's ribbon cable for the 6Gbps bay.

    If you're running a 3Gbps Mac then I'd say SSD 510 or 320. Still waiting to see how the smaller capacity drives perform though.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Omid.M - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Anand,

    And I bet Apple has been silent about the ribbon cable theory?

    I would hope a company with so many engineering resources (and so vertically integrated) could quickly look into something like that and rule it out.

    @moids
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I know why wouldn't Apple drop everything and use all their resources to investigate every theory about their hardware...
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Many, many Mac users are having issues with the Intel 510 but have seen no issues with the 320.
  • kasakka - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    OSX does support TRIM now, but it's only enabled for Apple branded drives. There's a hack that lets you enable it for all drives and at least on my X25-M it shows as enabled but can't say anything about performance - even without it the drive has been very fast for the year I've had it.

    I guess that OSX Lion will officially support TRIM for all drives.
  • Omid.M - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Thanks for the reply.

    I understand TRIM is not supported natively for non-Apple SSDs, but I also have read about the kext hack that enables TRIM for 3rd party drives. Of course, my question implies that I would enable this hack to try it out.

    From what I've read on MacRumors forums (and I believe AT forums), people are having better luck with Intel 320 than the Vertex 3. The speed difference can't be that noticeable in every day use (save for niche situations?), so I'd take reliability over a marginal increase in speed, assuming TRIM would be enabled via the hack.

    I think I would take the Intel 320 300 GB (280 GB usable) over the Vertex 3 240 GB.

    I'd love to see a comparison of error rates (RMA rates, I guess) between the manufacturers for those specific drive capacities.

    Maybe AFTER OCZ sends Anand the last batch of requested SSDs for testing? :)

    @moids
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    But they will in a month or so when Tiger comes out. Or you can download TRIM functionality right now.
  • B0GiE - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    NIce to see the review, shame you never looked at the Vertex 3 Max IOPS versions though. Any chance you can get hold of them and report on the differences?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Still waiting on my review sample, I'm guessing it'll be next week :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • sequoia464 - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    Any Idea when the Samsung 470 review will be up?? Quite interested in your take on this drive.
  • cearny - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Realyy great review, but in my case it raises even more doubt. I was about to pull the trigger on the 120GB version of the Intel 510, but now I don't know what performance to expect at all.

    Do you think you'll also be able review the lower-capacity Intel 510/320 drives in the near future?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    The 120GB 510 is next on my list :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • cearny - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    That's great news! Looking forward to the review :D
  • M@rc - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I have a question regarding TRIM: if I install both Windows 7 (TRIM support) and OS X (no TRIM) on the same SSD, will that potentially cause problems?
  • HilbertSpace - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Good question, I'm guessing it would only run TRIM on the windows partition and not the Mac one.
  • ajp_anton - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I don't need more than 120GB. Any chance of a review of Intel's 120GB version?
  • jjj - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Any word on a new firmware rls date? see http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p...

    Anyway waiting eagerly for M4 and Max IOPS @ 120GB reviews since those 2 seem to be the most interesting given the price/perf ratio.
  • fowldogs - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Anand,

    I have recently researched which SSD to purchase and from several reviews, your's as well as many others, the OCZ Vertex 2 or 3 seemed like the best choice for performance. However, as I read consumer reviews on different shopping sight (Newegg, Amazon, etc), the Vertex 2 and 3 drives received numerous low reviews; including many that said the drive died on them soon after purchase.

    Can you shed any light on this? Have you had any discussions with OCZ about their quality? I know that Mac's can be very finicky about SSD drives, but it seems many PC users were encountering problems too.

    For now, I have decided on a Crucial drive, but I would like to know more about the quality issues of OCZ.
  • Omid.M - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    If it's a ribbon cable issue for the 6 Gbps interface, then it would make the most sense to get the Intel 320 series SSD. Take a look on MacRumors about this drive versus Vertex 3 in the MBP, especially the 2011 models.

    Many more people are having good luck with Intel 320 than with Vertex 3. Sad.

    Maybe someone should tweet and email OCZ about it, given how closely they seemed to be working with AnandTech to address reliability issues?

    @moids
  • dagamer34 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Always follow the law of reviews: no one actively thinks to leave a positive review, people always glamor for attention with negative reviews.
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Yes but there is a critical mass of people with issues and much commonality among their complaints so that doesn't really work here.
  • seapeople - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    Yes, but when Intel drives get 3% of 1-star ratings and the Vertex 2 gets 20% of 1-star ratings with numerous people claiming multiple RMA's, it makes you think there's a significant difference in reliability.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Perhaps a little background is in order :)

    Whenever I hear about a failure of any component from one of our readers (either via a comment, email, twitter, etc...), I forward it on to the manufacturer of the product. Usually this results in two things: 1) the AT reader getting taken care of a little quicker than normal, and 2) the manufacturer getting the faulty product back sooner so they can figure out what went wrong. I do this with all products but SSDs are the most common given the large amount of growing pains we've had there as an industry.

    For a while there I was spending a lot of time talking to OCZ about failed Vertex 2s. Unfortunately I was traveling a lot at the start of it and didn't have time to pursue in great depth, but I alerted OCZ that there seemed to be a growing trend and asked for an explanation. Meanwhile I believe OCZ also saw the same trend, determined a root cause and addressed it.

    OCZ has the problem of being a relatively small company competing amongst much larger ones in the SSD space. As a result there's pressure to scale production but it's near impossible to quickly scale without missing something and it seems like quality has suffered at distinct points in its history. Each time OCZ usually makes good by its customers, but it's still a risk associated with buying from a smaller company vs. an Intel for example. I do believe the trend is generally positive, I do expect the Vertex 3 to be more reliable and consistent than anything in OCZ's past - but for utmost reliability, Intel seems to have the best return rates in the industry for SSDs.

    I have been meaning to check out OCZ's new manufacturing facilities which may give me some more insight into its investment in production and testing. I know on the validation side OCZ is leaps and bounds better than it was 2 years ago (I spent a lot of time discussing validation with OCZ back in the Vertex 1, Vertex 2 and Core days) but I'm not sure where they stand in terms of production.

    The Mac problems I believe are separate. There's a problem with some (not all) MBPs and some SSDs but I can't figure out what. OWC seems to think that the problems on the 17-inch 2011 MBPs are related to EMI and Apple's quirky SATA cable - I suspect this may extend to all of the models, I honestly just haven't had the time to test it.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    OWC is the one that made the false claims about OCZ ram specs (which you debunked) and they also sell a replacement cable. So I don't take anything they say very seriously. Weren't you the one who said manufacturers should ship to get things out even if they weren't quite ready? A post I strongly disagree with and is likely the cause of OCZ's troubles.
  • cactusdog - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Its really a shame you get a big performance hit with the 120GB version. Its easy to see how the marketing works.....first release the fast 240Gb version, once the reviews are up, release the slower mainstream 120GB version and hope no one looks at the fine print.

  • thornburg - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I realize that you're a big believer in the SandForce drives, but where are the reviews of other products?

    Is Intel the only one able to get any coverage?

    Where are the reviews of the new Samsung SSDs?
  • NCM - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Somebody is sure in love with their 4-die NAND packages! Enough that the 480GB drive costs well over triple the price of the 240GB version, even though virtually everything but the NAND should be the same. I could see a 480GB SSD for a grand, but $1800? (Or a 320GB for $750.) That's silly money, and a self-fullfilling prophecy to boot: they don't sell because they're so expensive because there's no production volume.

    Anand, to repeat somebody else's request in one of your previous SSD reviews, could you please include a typical 5400 rpm laptop drive in your power consumption comparisons? (The Seagate Momentus XT 500 hybrid doesn't really count as typical.)
  • tech6 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Thanks for another thorough review. I noticed that the Samsung 470 (and its OEM equivalent) are getting very popular. Any chance of a review?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I've been meaning to do a roundup focusing on 3Gbps drives and diving deeper on the 470, it's just a matter of finding the time. It's definitely on the list though.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    With Samsungs drive division having been sold to Seagate you have to wonder what happens to service and support of Samsung branded drives.
  • TotalLamer - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    ...any chance the Vertex 3s won't spontaneously brick themselves whenever they damned well choose like the Vertex 2s did? Such horridly unreliable drives.

    No Intel, no care.
  • jmunjr - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    A lot of ultraportable laptops use 7mm height drives. From what I ahve read the Vertex series are 9.5mm and cannot be easily modded to fit. The Crucial however have a space that can be easily removed(though it voids the warranty). Is really would be nice to have more SSD choices in the 7mm height option.
  • jcompagner - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I think also a warning must be given, because they really don't work quite right out of the box with everything default.

    I have a Dell XPS17 (L702x) and the Vertex 3 240GB, and installing windows 7 (sp1) is quite hard. The default AHCI driver of windows really doesn't work with the Vertex 3. So yes you can install it in sata mode that kind of works but you want AHCI, And setting that after install is not that easy (you really have to make sure that the latest intel drivers are there and then tweak some registry setting)
    Best thing to go around this is to use the Intel F6 driver right from the installer of Win7. That will help and then you can install it at once.
    The thing is that OCZ sees this as a problem with drivers or the system, i completely don't agree with this, there are many complaining constantly on the forum because of this. And the intel drive that i also have never have these problems they install just fine. So it is really OCZ which should look into why they are not compatible.

    Besides that after you have taken this hurdle you have ofcourse the LPM registry tweak you have to do to kill LPM mode. But this is not only a OCZ/Vertex problem also Crucial (C300) has this same problem. But again with the Intel SSD i haven't seen this problem also.

    I just think that the Vertex doesn't behave completely correct on all the SATA commands that are out there. I really hope for them that they can fix that (they get a bit of bad name i know enough forums that really don't recommend OCZ because of all this)

    But after all these install troubles i must say it is fast and works quite well.
    I don't really like that now a MAXIOPS version is coming also for the 240GB! I am curious of how much faster that will be

    One question: If the number of die's tells everything about the speeds, why is the 480GB then slower? (at least on paper)
  • Ammaross - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    "One question: If the number of die's tells everything about the speeds, why is the 480GB then slower? (at least on paper) "

    You didn't read the interleaving example then. If 2 die per chip, and 2 chips per channel fill up 4 of the 5 theoretical "slots" in the 5-clock example, imagine what 4 dies per chip and 2 chips per channel does trying to cram/schedule 8 dies into 5 slots? Then think what happens if all requests are going to one or two die on the same package? It's just a matter of clogging the pipes or burning slots due to a package already processing a request. You can think of it like the 8x/8x/4x SLI/CF situation with P67 where that 3rd gfx card just doesn't help much at all due to being data-starved, or the overhead of SLI/CF in itself.
  • jcompagner - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    but still, why is it even slower and not the same speed as the 240GB then?
  • darwinosx - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    It seems from public comments on New Egg and elsewhere that there a lot of unhappy owners of tis drive. High failure rate and many people continue to comment on how poor OCZ's tech support is which is the opposite of what this review says.
  • Lingyis - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    is there something anandtech can test about reliability? i had 3 OCZ vertex from a few years ago and 2 of them had bad sectors after about 6 months of use. whatever time i saved on the SSD was more than wiped out by my time having to reinstall software, and possibly each time it has to run chkdsk related commands. i have been quite reluctant to use SSD since--i went with good ol' HDD in my new laptop and chkdsk has yet to reveal any errors.

    some time ago, i read on this site that the officially from intel, failure rates are something like 1.2% for non-Intel drives and 0.5% for intel drives? obviously, massive data is required to get these kind of statistics, but if you can figure out some way of testing reliability on these SSD, that'll be much more important to people like me as SSD is fast enough for most practical purposes. perhaps you can run these drives intensely over a period of 30 days (probably more) and see if any data corruption sets in. if there's a way to limit read/write to a certain region of the SSD than better obviously, but the controller i suppose might have a say in that.
  • spudit99 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Because these drives are so new and right on the cutting edge, this is probably not going to happen. The enthusiast community is going to do be doing this job for them, letting them both sell drives and fix issues along the way. I'm still mucking around with a year old CS300 that took months to get running as desired....Anand went through the same debacle.

    if you are looking for a super stable SSD with a wide compatiblity range, the OCZ Vertex 3 probably is not the best choice. I would suggest either Samsung or Intel SSD's if stability is key.
  • sor - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Unfortunately there seems to be some sort of incompatibility between Linux and the Vertex 3. Specifically newer kernels, such as most recent versions of ubuntu. Symptoms include the disk not being found on boot about 80% of the time.

    From the logs and reports, it looks like the disk doesn't return from the ATA 'identify' command the way linux expects it to. It's a real bummer for me since Linux is more than just a hobby, at this point I've got a 240G Vertex 3 that I can't return for anything but a replacement. Wish I would have just gone with a C300/M4, or 520.

    http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+b...
  • sor - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I should add that we use hundreds of SSDs at work. We deploy maybe 8-10 a week. We've been eagerly awaiting the new Sandforce controllers to come out in order to try to use them in our servers, but since they don't play nice with Linux it's out of the question. Maybe another brand would work, but my impression was that the firmwares are mostly the same and come from Sandforce.
  • DanaG - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    If the Vertex 3 is anywhere near as buggy as the Vertex 2, I don't want one.
    It seems the drive can't handle ATA Security, even though it claims support for it. The drive fails to respond if given non-data (such as "unlock") commands after resume from suspend!

    http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
  • jcompagner - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    ah, then this is what i had with an older driver of intel
    BSOD always when resuming
    The latest driver of intel i don't have that problem anymore but i guess that now doesn't send that command or something

    But yes i already told OCZ at there forum that they really should look into this, that it is not a real driver issue (yes the driver can fix it by not sending those commands) but it is really an issue that the Vertex 2 or 3 doesn't really work well with all the sata commands, i think many problems reported by many peoples are all coming down to that.

    OCZ/Sandforge should really really be looking into that!
  • DanaG - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    For me, it's not the driver doing it -- the same happens in both Windows and Linux. It's my laptop's firmware that's sending "non-data commands".

    How can you claim to "support" ATA Security if the drive becomes unresponsive when told to unlock? If you suspend with drive locked, you can be nearly 100% certain you'll want to unlock the drive at resume.
    For some people, it doesn't even take lock/unlock to make the drive crap out -- perhaps the BIOS calls an IDENTIFY command, or such.

    Anand, can you please try to get OCZ and/or Sandforce to do something about this buggy firmware? My old Indilinx drive handled suspend/resume (while locked) perfectly fine!

    Check out that forum post for info on how to reproduce the issue.
  • danjw - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I am considering switching to an SSD on my desktop. Currently, I have a regular defrag scheduled via windows scheduler. Should I get rid of this for an SSD?
  • evilspoons - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Yes, definitely. The Intel SSD toolbox actually does this automatically if it detects a scheduled defrag.
  • Spacecomber - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I know that you've got your hands full with keeping up with reviewing the individual SSD models that are being released, Anand, but I think it would be helpful if you or another writer could put together a guide or overview of this hardware segment for someone thinking to take the plunge into a SSD for their system.

    Things that I would be interested in are bang for your buck comparisons, which types of drives would be the best match for particular usage scenarios, and which drives are likely to be the easiest to adapt to and most trouble free to use.

    As I think you suggested in an earlier comment (re: vertex 2 vs vertex 3), a lot of the differences between these drives covered in these detailed reviews are not necessarily differences that can be readily detected in actual use, and the big difference is between a normal HDD and a SDD. Yet, I don't think that this means we are at a stage where you simply look for the least expensive SSD that has the capacity you want (which seems to be pretty close to the case when it comes to HDDs, these days).

    I've read these SDD reviews with varying degrees of scrutiny, since I'm not necessarily ready to buy one right now. If I had to simplify what I've taken away these reviews, so far, into a rule of thumb, it would be to buy the largest capacity Intel drive that I could afford. Of course, I may be way off base in reaching that conclusion, which is why I would be interested in a guide.
  • spudit99 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Company I work for has deployed several SSD's in laptops especially. Samsung and Intel drives have been trouble free, although not always at the very top of speed list.

    Best advice I can give is find a good buy and try one out. My personal experience is extremely positive, even with the 2+ year old SSD drive in my laptop. Yes, the cost is high, but IMO the performance gain is hard to beat.

    They are fast, quiet, and as long as you aren't trying to be the first to have the latest product, very reliable. The only SSD trouble I've had was with a personal purchase (CS300), which took a return and several firmware updates to fix. Reading about this stuff is great, but unless you want to pave the way, I would be at least somewhat conservative.
  • ggathagan - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Your takeaway is correct.

    I see a lot of comments in this and other SSD articles that talk about Sandforce not being ready for prime time.
    As Anand has repeatedly mentioned, one of the drawbacks for a small, niche-technology company is an inability to match companies like Intel in the R&D arena.
    The consumer, in essence, has been the R&D department for Sandforce.

    When it comes to the average user, there are no performance examples that I can think of where a Sandforce-based drive will make enough difference to make it worth the risk over Intel.
    Cutting edge technology is not worth it in this particular arena.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    -- When it comes to the average user, there are no performance examples that I can think of where a Sandforce-based drive will make enough difference to make it worth the risk over Intel.

    And, given that Enterprise data is frequently encrypted/compressed into databases, they won't be much use in Enterprise. Marvell might end up the winner as OEM controller vendor.
  • AlainD - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Hi

    I've found that AS-SSD has a compression benchmark. Would be nice to add those to the reviews. Probably only 6GBps is usefull.

    I'm surprised that the new sandforce controller is capable of sequential reading approx. 500 MB even if the data is compressed. Writing seems to be another story and then the AS-SSD compression benchmark could be some extra info.
  • Casper42 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Bought my wife a new HP DV6T Quad Core Sandy and bought it with a traditional 640GB drive because I knew I wanted a (what I call) 3rd generation SSD which the dont offer yet.

    However, I noticed the Intel Storage Manager is in the System Tray and that leads me to beleive the Intel SATA driver is probably loaded too. I would think they wouldnt load this due to the previous issues with the driver breaking TRIM support under 7, but then thought perhaps they load a slightly different image on machines they ship with Factory SSDs.

    Anyway, to cut to the point, Do the latest Intel SATA drivers still break Win7 TRIM support? Or has that all been fixed and I just wasn't paying attention?

    Thx,
    Casper
  • InsaneScientist - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    As of version 9.6 (march of last year, I think), yes the Intel drivers will work with TRIM if the drives aren't in a RAID array.
  • Casper42 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Due to the speed differences in the 120 vs 240 and the nature of SF drives and incompressible data.....

    I am wondering what your recommendation would be for a 120GB drive going into a Windows laptop that will be running a very traditional desktop software load. Not a lot of games, not a lot of Video Editing. Mainly just surfing the net and running Office type apps?

    Budget is less of a concern than speed and reliability, but within reason. I will take a 10-20% hit on price to get a better product but approach 50% and things change.
  • anonapon - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    I'm curious how this will affect SSD caching. When they come out, I'm hoping to put together a system as soon as possible with a Z68 board and I've been thinking about having a really great drive like the Vertex 3 as my system and application drive, either one 240 or two 120s in RAID0, and using a small and reliable but otherwise mediocre SSD to cache a single large mechanical drive; but, as far as I understand it, SSD caching will require the latest Intel 10.x RST drivers, and OCZ's firmware doesn't work with the latest Intel 10.x RST drivers.

    Is this other people's understanding as well, and does anyone know if there will be a solution soon?
  • mars2k - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    I have IRST 10.xxx loaded F6 during clean Win7 SP1 x64 install on SB 2820QM, 240Gb Vertex3. Loaded Win 7 with a thumb drive. It took ten minutes or less from 1rst boot for the intall to browsing the internet. Way cool!
    I am experiencing some hangs. There is a fix for this on the OCZ forums. Will try.
  • BLU82 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link

    Great review as always Anand, but have a couple of questions for you. Do you know if you will get a sample of the 480GB V3? Not that any of us could afford one, but since these are parallel devices I would be interested to see how its performance would stack up against the 120 and 240. I am assuming that they just use the "J" designated chips over the "C"???

    Also, do you know what differences the newer "Max IOPS' versions would perform over these first releases? I returned a vanilla 120GB version right after I saw where OCZ introduced the MAX IOPS version but still not sure whether to go that route, try and RAID 0 two 120GB vanilla versions, MAX IOPS version, or get one 240GB vanilla or MAX IOPS version??? I liked the 120GB version and really find it hard to try and run my Sandy Bridge on a Velociraptor again, but since it was a first release and what you pointed out between the 120 and 240 versions made me think I should have just waited on a 240. But man, that price tag. Which, brings me back to the 480GB version. Don't hear anyone talking about it (due to the price I'm sure), but I would be very curious about the performance and if there are any differences between it and the 240.

    Thanks again Anand. I've actually been reviewing your site since it's inception way back in the mid-late 90's. You do a great job and always have.
  • neotiger - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    In your random read benchmark, Vertex 3 120GB clocked in at 35MB/s while Corsair Force 120GB achieved a much better performance at 58MB/s.

    Corsair Force actually use the last generation of SandForce. So why is the new generation of SandForce so much slower than the last generation product?

    Was there an error in the benchmark?
  • Just3r1d7 - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    Dear Anand,

    I have been carefully reading SSD articles for the past 18 months waiting for the right time to make a purchase for both my home and work PCs... The depth and breadth of SSD coverage on AnandTech has been stellar, and this latest Vertex 3 review is no exception.

    It's clear that the Vertex 3 240GB is the "best performing" drive for $500. However, as other posters have noted, all of the information floating around about SSDs hasn't necessarily resulted in clear guidelines or practical recommendations.

    My guess is that the "average" user isn't going to spend $500 on an SSD for their home PC... Thus, as you continue to conduct these reviews, it may be helpful to compile a table/chart to guide your dedicated readers (and anyone else who browses the site). This would also have the benefit of reducing the number of "I have Processor A, Chipset B, and Operating System C, which SSD should I buy?" questions that arise.

    Here are a few examples of questions which seem to come up repeatedly and could probably be answered by a summary table of recommendations based on drives currently available in retail channels:
    1. What is the best "small" capacity drive? (at any cost)
    2. What is the best "low cost" drive? (at any capacity)
    3. What is the best performing OS/application drive?
    4. What is the best drive for non-TRIM supported OS? (e.g. WinXP or Mac)
    5. What is the best (most reliable) drive for a business PC?

    Just some food for thought... Keep up the great work on the SSD coverage and reviews!

    -Bob
  • Wardrop - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    Anyone know when OCZ will refresh their RevoDrive line with SF2xxx controllers? I'll be getting one of them.
  • iwod - Sunday, May 8, 2011 - link

    In an ideal world, the NAND would get smaller every node shrink, and we could fit more die inside an NAND package.
    However with every die shrink they also double the capacity of the minimum die size. i.e from 64Gbit to 128 Gbit ... etc
    If 8 Channel and 8 NAND Package being a constant factor, we are only going to get more capacity at the same price, but not lower price at lower capacity.

    Is there any reason behind this?

    And that is why when i see people saying i will wait for SSD to drop below $50 etc.... They are halving the price every year so i will wait a year or two before i get it. The truth is it is never going to happen. The absolute minimum BOM *equation* for SSD has stay constant for years. Unless the minimum price per NAND die is going to drop, may be what we see today is already the absolute minimum price / SSD we will ever see?
  • ibliblibli - Sunday, May 8, 2011 - link

    A thorough review, but I'd like to understand why the HDTach charts showing the read-and-write performance before-torture, after-torture and post-TRIM are not shown. I know the average sustained writes do not change much even after torturing the drive, but I'm interested in the volatility. None of other the articles covering the latest Sand Force drives (OCZ Vertex 3 Pro/Non-Pro 240 GB Previews, OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB Review, OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G Review) show this data either. However, the reviews for the other new drives (Intel 510, Intel 320 and Crucial m4) includes those charts. Is there a reason for this exclusion? The information from those charts is helpful.
  • NorthShoreExile - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    Based on the initial review, I ordered one for my new build. It took weeks to arrive but I finally got it. All I can say is "WOW"! It is everything it claims to be.
  • jinino - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    Great review Anand,

    From the photo in the last page, I see the disk is made in Taiwan. Do you happen to know that OCZ's SSD is manufactured by the same OEM in Taiwan as the manufacturer for Intel's SSD?
  • alpha754293 - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link

    Wonderful review on the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

    I was wondering if you might be able to run the full h2benchw benchmark on the drive?

    You should be able to download it here:
    http://www.heise.de/software/download/h2benchw/378... or just google it.

    Can you post or email me the results please?

    Thank you.
  • ueharaf - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link

    what is the difference between vertex 3 and solid 3?
    http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-solid-3-sata-iii-...
  • sanguy - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link

    Hi,

    We just received 5 Vertex 3 240GB drives for installation into some Dell E6520 laptops. We did the install but with the Vertex 3 installed we've been having random system lock-ups that require a hard boot.

    We are in AHCI mode in the bios and running Windows 7x64 with the 10.1 Intel RST drivers. Drives are firmware 2.02.

    We are seeing this on several laptops/drives so it's not a one off.

    Drive is detected by the toolkit OCZ has available, and RST reports it correct at 6Gbps.

    These are sandy bridge quad core laptops using a 6 series chipset.

    Anyone seeing compatibility issues? I did find a thread at OCZ over disabling some function in the registry which we did without it solving the issue.
  • DanaG - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - link

    I'd say Sandforce drives are just plain buggy, if you try to do anything non-desktop with them. (Even my old Indilinx drive was more stable.)

    From what you're seeing, the new ones must be even worse than the old ones.

    Check my comments on Page 6, and this link:

    http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
  • explorer007 - Monday, May 23, 2011 - link

    I got exacltly same problem even after firmware 2.06! Anyone better luck?
  • beelzebub253 - Saturday, May 28, 2011 - link

    For those of you using Vertex 3 in AHCI mode with the Intel RST drivers, have you tried the LPM Disable fix discussed below?

    http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SS...

    Check the Event Viewer (System Logs) for an error about iaStor: "did not respond within the timeout period". The entries will be at the exact time of your freeze-ups. Mine had the same problem until I applied the reg fix.
  • sequoia464 - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - link

    I wonder how this matches up against the Samsung 470.

    I guess we will never know as it appears that the Samsung 470 has still not been reviewed here at AnandTech.

    Hint.
  • tannebil - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link

    I just installed a 120GB IOPS and I'm seeing ~240MB/s in AS SSD for sequential write. That's 50% higher than you got in your test last month of the regular 120GB model. My understanding is that the sequential performance should be quite similar between the IOPS and regular model so there's something odd going on. My sequential read results match yours.

    If you look across all the different tests, the AS SSD write results seem to be an outlier since the drive is a great performer in all the rest of the benchmarks. The OWC driver had the same odd results so maybe it's something specific to the SF 2200 controller and your test platform.

    My system is a Biostar TH67+ H67 motherboard with a i5-2400 processor with the SSD is connected to an SATAIII port as the boot drive (Windows 7 HP).
  • johnnydolk - Monday, May 16, 2011 - link

    Here in Denmark the Vertex 3 retails slightly cheaper than the Intel 510, but at 25% more than the Crucial M4, which brings the latter on par with the older Vertex 2. This is for the 240/250/256GB versions.
    I guess the M4 is the one to get if value for money matters?
  • werewolf2000 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link

    Hi, I'm a bit disappointed. Read all the reviews and was excited about Vertex 3.
    Got it recently ... but, I'm sorry to say it, it is not good. It maybe fast, but it is freezing. For a little while just sometimes, but it is. It has some consequences, for example when you play mp3, you hear some annoying sounds every 1 - 2 minutes. Seems I'm not the only one having these issues, the tricks from here http://geekmontage.com/texts/ocz-vertex-3-freezes-... help partially, but not fully.
    I had Intel G1 some time ago, it behaved similarly after several months of usage, Intel G2 didn't have such issues at all. Now the "best" Vertex 3 has these problems from the beginning (I had two of them, one failed immediately, the second one still lives but freezes).
    Maybe, Anand, you could test things like that? Speed is not all, freezing is VERY annoying.
  • zilab - Saturday, June 4, 2011 - link

    While OCZ's 120GB drive can interleave read/program operations across two NAND die per channel, the 240GB drive can interleave across a total of four NAND die per channel.


    Hi Anand,

    Great article, just a question:
    WIll having a pair of 120GB in RAID 0, make this a non-issue? in terms of speed and resiliency ?
  • Mohri - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

    Thanks Anand for nice reviews,

    i got macbook pro 2011- Intel i7 2.2 - 8gb ram - 1gb ddr5 video
    and i want to install a ssd for it, now i wanted to ask you to recommend me which brand is better for me?

    Thank you very much
  • samehvirus - Saturday, August 27, 2011 - link

    To make it short for you all .... OCZ rushed the drive to the market, they want you to BETA Test it, you are stuck with them the moment you buy it, they will keep you in their "RMA or wait for firmware Loop" this SSD is a big "AVOID IT" for main drive (OS+Programs/etc) it will annoy you to no end and a solution atm as of may 26 does not exist neither OCZ admit it yet even when plenty of people are reporting the same issue, they will always try to blame your other hardware or software for the BSOD and never about their own SSD

    If you want to be a beta tester go ahead and buy it, OCZ got no solution to offer atm, they are basically selling a product that works 90% of the time so some users wont notice it (those who use their computer 1-2hours a day) if you leave your computer +5hours a day or on all the time prepare to a daily BSOD, Until OCZ offer a solution .
  • paul-p - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link

    After 6 months of waiting for OCZ and Sandforce to fix their firmware from freezes and BSOD's, I can finally say it is fixed. No more freezes, no more BSOD's, performance is what is expected. And just to make sure all of the other suggestions were 100% a waste of time, I updated the firmware and DID NOT DO anything else except reboot my machine and magically everything became stable. So, after all these months of OCZ and Sandforce blaming everything under the sun including:

    The CMOS battery, OROM's, Intel Drivers, Intel Chipsets, Windows, LPM, Hotswap, and god knows what else, it turns out that none of those issues had anything to do with the real problem, which was the firmware.

    While I'm happy that this bug is finally fixed, Sandforce and OCZ have irrepairably damaged their reputation for a lot of users on this forum.

    Here is a list of terrible business practices that OCZ and Sandforce have done over the last year...

    OCZ did not stand behind their product when it was clearly malfunctioning is horrible.
    OCZ did not allow refunds KNOWING that the product is defective is ridiculous.
    OCZ nor Sandforce even acknowledged that this was a problem and steadfastly maintained it only affected less than 1% of users.
    The fact that OCZ claims this bug affected 1% of users is ridiculous. We now know it affected 100% of the drives out there. Most users just aren't aware enough to know why their computer froze or blue screened.
    OCZ made their users beta test the firmwares to save money on their own testing
    OCZ did not have a solution but expected users to wipe drives, restore from backups, secure erase, and do a million other things in order to "tire out" the user into giving up.
    OCZ deletes and moves threads in order to do "damage control and pr spin".

    But the worst sin of all is the fact that it took almost a year to fix such a MAJOR bug.

    I really hope that OCZ learns from this experience, because I'm certain that users will be wary of Sandforce and OCZ for some time. It's a shame, because now that the drive works, I actually like it.

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