OCZ Core series -- Affordable, high-performance SSDs
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
New version is coming out soonOCZ recently unveiled their latest range of Solid State Drives (SSD), aiming to hit the balance between cost and performance. With only a few exceptions, SSDs haven't received a warm welcome from consumers yet - almost certainly due to the cost, as the price per gigabyte is considerably higher than that for traditional hard drives.
Only a small handful of major technology companies have entered this new, emerging market, and perhaps for a good reason. However, the new drives could be the start of a push to lower prices without lowering performance drastically either. The new range, available in capacities of 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB is a mixture of good performance (in comparison to existing SSDs, as well as their own range) and value. With read speeds of up to 200MB a second, and write speeds of 160MB, very few SSDs beat it in terms of performance, and fewer still regarding cost.
OCZ's recommended prices for the 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB models are USD $129, $249, $469, and $869 respectively - not enough to tempt those with lower budgets, but, in comparison to Intel's SSD offerings (which have faster read speeds, but slower write speeds), it offers better value for money.
with even larger caches and faster performance!
200mb/s read, and 160mb/sec read is smoking!
1 of these as system drive and swap file - and 2x1TB regular HD in raid mirrored format for data would be ideal in my book
That would make any system feel really fast
The previous OCZ SSDs:
Core v1 (SATAII):
30GB, 60GB, 120GB with Read Speed 153MB/s and Write Speed ~80MB/s
Core v2 (SATAII + miniUSB):
30GB, 60GB, 120GB, 250GB with Read Speed 170MB/s and Write Speed 90MB/s
The problem with these versions is that they have a random write speed of about 20MB/s. Also, when running an operating system like Vista from the drive you may experience stuttering or lag because there is no on-board cache.
These new drives (I thought they would be called Core v3) have onboard cache to remove the stutter and lag effect. 64MB of cache! They also improve random writes, like the expensive Intel drives. I wasn't expecting sequential writes to be so fast. 160MB/s! Wow!
Press release for the new Vertex series SSD
OCZ / About OCZ / Press Releases / 2008 / OCZ Technology Introduces the High Performance Vertex Series Solid State Drive, Delivering on the Promise of Ultimate Performance and Affordability
OCZ Technology Introduces the High Performance Vertex Series Solid State Drive, Delivering on the Promise of Ultimate Performance and Affordability
2008-12-09
Sunnyvale, CA—December 9, 2008—OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled the OCZ Vertex SATA II 2.5â€
OCZ / About OCZ / Press Releases / 2008 / OCZ Technology Introduces the High Performance Vertex Series Solid State Drive, Delivering on the Promise of Ultimate Performance and Affordability
OCZ Technology Introduces the High Performance Vertex Series Solid State Drive, Delivering on the Promise of Ultimate Performance and Affordability
2008-12-09
Sunnyvale, CA—December 9, 2008—OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled the OCZ Vertex SATA II 2.5â€
I picked up an OCZ 1SLD30G from Newegg for $70. It seems really fast to me. It does make a slight squealing noise during heavy IO, ie unzipping a huge file. Below is an image of the 1SLD30G compared to a Samsung HD321KJ, a 320GB mechanical disk. I haven't detected any freezing or hanging during heavy IO, but it sure slows down when unzipping a huge file. Overall I'm really pleased with it, especially considering how cheap it is. BTW, my chipset is ICH9R.
here is a review that details the pauses/stuttering issue on the SSD with the JMicron controller, ie the older OCZ ones
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... i=3403&p=1
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... i=3403&p=1
Well, what do you know...
I just voided the warranty on my drive by popping it open. It uses a JMF602 controller, which is what the Core V2 uses. I don't know if I'm lucky or what, but I'm not experiencing stutters like many Core V2 owners have been. I'm running XP SP2 with stock settings, no tweaks.
By the way, I took benchmarks with the drive empty and with the OS on it, it performed almost identically in both cases.
WTF are they doing selling the same drive by two different names (Core series, Solid series), and with two different prices???
I just voided the warranty on my drive by popping it open. It uses a JMF602 controller, which is what the Core V2 uses. I don't know if I'm lucky or what, but I'm not experiencing stutters like many Core V2 owners have been. I'm running XP SP2 with stock settings, no tweaks.
By the way, I took benchmarks with the drive empty and with the OS on it, it performed almost identically in both cases.
WTF are they doing selling the same drive by two different names (Core series, Solid series), and with two different prices???
They list different speeds too. Solid may have cheaper flash modules or some other difference.wsc wrote:Well, what do you know...
I just voided the warranty on my drive by popping it open. It uses a JMF602 controller, which is what the Core V2 uses. I don't know if I'm lucky or what, but I'm not experiencing stutters like many Core V2 owners have been. I'm running XP SP2 with stock settings, no tweaks.
By the way, I took benchmarks with the drive empty and with the OS on it, it performed almost identically in both cases.
WTF are they doing selling the same drive by two different names (Core series, Solid series), and with two different prices???
I've been trying to find this information for quite a while.wsc wrote:Well, what do you know...
I just voided the warranty on my drive by popping it open. It uses a JMF602 controller, which is what the Core V2 uses. I don't know if I'm lucky or what, but I'm not experiencing stutters like many Core V2 owners have been. I'm running XP SP2 with stock settings, no tweaks.
By the way, I took benchmarks with the drive empty and with the OS on it, it performed almost identically in both cases.
WTF are they doing selling the same drive by two different names (Core series, Solid series), and with two different prices???
For the stuttering you can do a more telling test by following what the guy who wrote the anandtech article did. From the article:
Basically you want the max write latency to be similar to the average latency for an SSD.Iometer is a great tool for simulating disk accesses, you just need to know what sort of behavior you want to simulate. In my case I wanted to write tons of small files to the drive and look at latency, so I told Iometer to write 4KB files to the disk in a completely random pattern (100% random). I left the queue depth at 1 outstanding IO since I wanted to at least somewhat simulate a light desktop workload.
Iometer reports four results of importance: the number of IOs per second, the average MB/s, the average write latency and the maximum write latency. I looked at performance of four drives, the OCZ Core (Jmicron controller MLC), OCZ SLC (Samsung controller), Intel MLC (Intel controller) and the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 (a 7200RPM 2.5" notebook drive).