SPCR

Yeah, I too was a little surprised. They start off fine and then just go completly insane. I was hoping for a little more consistecy.

Those read and write tests are totally invalid as he is doing them with the OS and apps running from that drive.

To test it properly it should be a blank drive running secondary to the OS/app drive.

There is no telling what other activity was occurring during those tests that could have skewed the numbers. Wait for a proper test with no data on the drive.

Well, I got mine but think there is a problem with it. I am getting excellent read results but can not complete any synthetic benchmark on it for writing. HDTach, HDTune and everest all hang. I tried installing Vista and Ubuntu on it and neither will complete.

Update: I was able to load up a copy of unbuntu on it on my laptop. But since the OS is loaded I can not run any write benchmarks.

A compatibility issue maybe? How many controllers have you tried it on? How does it run on your laptop with the OS loaded? Does it feel sluggish?

Very odd, please keep us up to date on what you figure out. Have you contacted OCZ support yet?

As "frostedflakes" says, it could be compatability. I see that you have it hooked upto some kind of Adaptec (RAID.?) card, how does it work attached to the motherboard.


Andy

I was able to load Windows up on the OCZ Core drive also. It turns out I was just being impatient. The Drive partitioning/formating juts takes an extremely long time. I thought for sure the process locked because there was no progress for a long time.

On my laptop I upgraded from a Gen 1 Samsung SSD that was slow. This is so much better and does not have random freezes.

I did not try it on the motherboard of my desktop as I pretty much keep that disabled and use the Adaptec 51645 to control all hard drives and CD's. When the drive was plugged in the Adaptec would randomly hang at boot up also so I am not sure just how RAID compatible they are.

I will try later in the week to load it up on the MB controller and get some write tests.

Ok, I hooked the OCZ drive up to my motherboard and had no problem at all with the write tests. I did all three hdtach tests

Looks pretty good, thanks for the benches Turas.

That looks beter Turas, thanks.

Does anyone know the technical reason why the "8MB Zones" test is so much better for writing than the "32MB Zones" test.? And as a second question, why do the read/write rates fluctuate so much, is it due to reading/writing from more than one data chip at a time (or not reading/writing from one data chip at a time). This to me seems a bit odd without an explanation especially as the seek time does not change at all.


Andy

Turas wrote:Ok, I hooked the OCZ drive up to my motherboard and had no problem at all with the write tests. I did all three hdtach tests

Thanks for being so thorough.

Andy, I think you are on to something there but my understanding is still not great of them. I have noticed in some other forums that when setting up RAID arrays with them that certain stripe sizes are best. I believe for the MTron drives it was 64KB and that was due to the fact the drives with that chunk of data at once. That value could be different based on the controller and SLC/MLC types.

Again this is only speculation from some other things I have read.

Appears to be a review of the 64GB drive at benchmark reviews:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... iew&id=200

Thanks for all the info guys; I pulled the trigger as the price and performance was too tempting Should be waiting for me when I get back from break in about 10 days.

yefi wrote:Appears to be a review of the 64GB drive at benchmark reviews:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... iew&id=200

Core Series Final Thoughts

EDITORS NOTE 07/25/08: There have been an above-average number of reports indicating data corruption on the OCZ Core SSD. The problem is primarily attributed to the ACHI feature being enabled in the BIOS, even though the manual suggests that this feature is disabled to preserve stability. Benchmark Reviews received our sample unit directly from OCZ and was asked to return it after only a few days, and because of this arrangement were unable to complete long-term stability testing for product reliability.

...

As a product analyst, I often get to have my hands on product that I would otherwise never spend my own money to purchase. Certainly without argument, Solid State Drives fit perfectly into this category. There are many products which I feel are so new that it's better to let them ripen on the vine, and with a little time they will mature into something everyone wants.

There's actually a very good analysis of the drive here and why it may not be a good idea for some people versus SLC products:

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Bar81 wrote:There's actually a very good analysis of the drive here and why it may not be a good idea for some people versus SLC products:

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Very solid data. Well I guess it'll be another year before I seriously look at an SSD for my personal use.

Since a month I'm playing with idea of buying one of them (and with my girlfriend about budget for it ) - 32GB version for system drive - but, after those readings, I will wait another 2-3 months for some reliability info. None the less - the price is very tempting....

steve’s alternative recursion wrote:http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Why do both drives run CPU usage to ~40% in the read test and ~30% in the write test?
That doesnt seem right to me.

AuraAllan wrote:

steve’s alternative recursion wrote:http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Why do both drives run CPU usage to ~40% in the read test and ~30% in the write test?
That doesnt seem right to me.

Wow! I didn't notice this .... Any idea why?

AuraAllan wrote:

steve’s alternative recursion wrote:http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Why do both drives run CPU usage to ~40% in the read test and ~30% in the write test?
That doesnt seem right to me.

Where do you see CPU usage? It's cut off when I view the page.

I cut off cpu usage because it was misleading.

CPU usage is normal, similar to rotating discs.

Some other reviews:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/ocz-core-seri ... d-hands-on

http://blog.laptopmag.com/in-depth-with ... w-cost-ssd

There's a question about the Intel chipset possibly causing the slow write problems. I don't know too much about it to comment.

Nice. Pretty much confirms the other reviews. For opening apps/reading, this thing is as fast as SLC at a fraction of the price.

I don't know what the deal is with Intel southbridges and SSDs in general; there seem to be issues. In any case, I'll update here when I get mine set up on the JMicron 360 controller on my MB.

8steve8 wrote:I cut off cpu usage because it was misleading.

CPU usage is normal, similar to rotating discs.

Nice updates. Any chance you can test on a non-Intel controller to confirm the findings?

Random writes were always the achilles heel of ssd, but 4 IOPS is truly risible.

yefi wrote:Random writes were always the achilles heel of ssd, but 4 IOPS is truly risible.

250ms is not uncommon random-write access time for cheap flash such as USB sticks at all.

But for a SSD it is terrible. Good to know anyway, and I will stay a LONG way away from this. You'd get better parallell random-write performance by simply using CF in RAID mode.

I have been using this drive for about two weeks now and am loving it. I was previous using a gen one samsung ssd in my notebook and have noticed a diffence even between the two. I strange freezes that I had with the Samsung are gone. Could it be faster, sure, but this seems to be a good comprimise. The gen one 64GB Samsung was just too little space (and much slower) and the 128GB memoright which although performs stellar it is a little out of my budget. I have mine loaded with Vista and the BIOS set to use AHCI. I know there were some issue of people not getting it to work in AHCI mode but luckily that has not been a problem so far.

I have seen a lot of negative reviews on it so just wanted to give one positive experience with it. Is it perfect no, but it will hold until the Intel of those new Samsungs with teh 200/160 speeds become a reality

The Core is a monster; it just puts my Raptor to shame - we're talking full XP install in under thirty minutes, full Office 2003 install in around 8 minutes and programs open instantaneously (Firefox, Word, etc.) I'm using it on my motherboard's JMB port in IDE mode and have left write caching on with no issues so far. Write speed is excellent as well (guess desktop users don't do many random writes). With regard to the extremely limited number of issues reported in the ocz forums, note that ime the Core controller is *very* sensitive with regard to stability. Overclocked settings that worked fine with my Raptor would lead to a corrupt Office install (for some reason, it has been my experience that systems can pass days of memtest and orthos and fail an Office installation - it has been the one true indicator of stability) with the Core; when I clocked the system back to stock everything went smoothly (the only reason I had overclocked was to help the Raptor with regards to speed of opening programs but now at stock the system is faster than it was overclocked). The best $300 I've spent in some time; can't wait to pair it with a Deneb when they're released later this year.

Nice to know they perform well under real-world conditions, thanks for the info guys.

Just a small modification to my original post. I was getting random hitching so I disabled write caching and it disappeared, so ocz support is correct in saying that AHCI and write caching should be disabled in XP (apparently Vista SP1 is SSD aware). Also, as recommended to increase life expectancy I've moved the XP swap file from the Core to my RAID1 (will later upgrade to a hardware RAID1 controller from Areca). One last thing, not only are these things silent but they are also impossibly small; I was shocked when I realized that 80% of the box is just packaging material (and the box is small to begin with).