OCZ Vertex 3.20 240GB SSD w/20nm Flash Review

Testing, Empty and Running Windows 7

Typical test procedure here, first I tested the drive empty, then I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit, booted off the drive and re-ran the tests.

The system used:

ATTO

First up is ATTO, favorite of drive manufacturers everywhere for it’s ability to squeeze the most performance possible out of a drive.

Empty:

That’s faster than the old Vertex3 240GB MaxIOPS. That’s sort of scary, really. That was a $400+ drive, this is a $215ish drive.

How about with windows installed?

No meaningful change. Nice!

AS SSD

Different sort of workload here, not as friendly to SSDs in general and Sandforce controllers in particular as ATTO is.

Empty:

Again, faster than the MaxIOPS (except in 4k reads with 64 threads). Very fast indeed.

Windows installed:

There’s a little bit of a hit in 4k reads, but that’s about it. Using up some capacity doesn’t seem to matter much to this drive.

CrystalDiskMark

Yet another flavor of workload, often the least friendly to Sandforce based stuff.

Empty:

Big numbers are Large. Again the only place it looses to the old (top end, unbeatable) Vertex 3 MaxIOPS is in heavily threaded / deep queue 4k reads. Elsewhere it wins.

Windows installed:

As seen previously, the 4k no-queue stuff is down a bit, everything else is more or less where it was before.

PCMark05

Lastly, for the extreme benchmarkers out there, PCMark05. This was run empty, for obvious reasons:

One of the highest single-drive HDD General Usage I’ve personally seen, the only drive that I’ve tested that has scored higher there is the OCZ Vector. That includes the Revodrive3’s! Do keep in mind that PC05 is an odd beast and does not in any way reflect normal computer usage.

All told, very nice performance. No complaints from me.