@ALL

I am not sure why, but their is something drastically wrong with my OCZ Vertex 120 Gig drive. After using it normally for the last 4 months, running the wiper tool they supply on it once a week, these are the results i am getting from a used system, and 64 bit vista to boot!

http://s665.photobucket.com/albums/vv20/oczuser/?action=view&curren...

This is a used drive, so why are my results so impressive?
Like i have said many times, this is what most (~90%) Vertex useds are getting.

The results of this site are just plain wrong. and are flawed. I do not like doing these benchmarks, because they are hard on the drive, because it is MLC nands, and any research will show you this. The drives are meant to be enjoyed, not benchmarked 24/7.

This people is a real world test, on a used system.

I think a lot of you may want to read this also, it is very relavant to all this, contrary to what the site says.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-sol...

Could the next test include Linux file systems such as ext3?

I don't get why the Vertex is so popular amongst many enthusiasts. Is it particularly cheap? I've never seen it excel in any benchmarks compared to its competitors.

SSDs remind me a lot of LCDs: lots of benefits compared to the previous gen technology, but at the same time a lot of new drawbacks/weaknesses that the previous tech did NOT have.

Great job as always, Geoff.

I stayed out of the discussions on this on the original article and podcast article, but now that this additional information is available... I really feel that it is completely irrelevant if the Barefoot drives perform well when you run them on Windows Vista 64-bit, with an ICH10R chipset, with a specific (non-factory default) firmware revision, after scheduling and running a beta (and possibly data corrupting) third-party utility, and with all the other ands, ifs, and buts.

A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. It should work without needing to "fiddle" with it and endlessly monitor performance, and work with the prevalent, existing consumer operating systems.

If OCZ and Indilinx specifically advertised this drive as only compatible with ICH10R and Windows 7 (or perhaps Vista 64-bit, though I too remain skeptical), then maybe I'd feel differently. As it is, though, any normal consumer with Windows XP and a relatively modern computer with SATA 3Gbps ports, would and should just expect the device to work, and it clearly does not.

So, thanks again for all of your extremely hard work in detailing this issue. I look forward to seeing the results with the new rig, but mostly only for informational purposes. Even if it performs perfectly with Vista 64-bit and the ICH10R, that doesn't change the fact that the device is fundamentally broken (or at least falsely advertised).

SSDs have never been the same beast as magnetic-based HDDs.

Performance and capacity degradation happens to be one primary drawbacks of SSDs. The current issue is ironing out the rate of degradation to more an acceptable level. It does not help that most customer-grade OS's IO kernel are still coded with HDDs in mind.

I see no point in getting SSDs until the issues are ironed out and GB/$$$$ ratio comes closer to HDDs.

A Simple request to TR:

I think a missing link here is the boot time. This new article doesn't explain at all why boot times are slower with the Intel SSD's then the 7200 mechanical HDD.

If we read the charts correctly, even if we take that the boot time is a 100% wright and no read, on the Intel SSDs, the boot time should not be impacted as much as it did by the "used" state.

Using the chart for both read and write operation test (# of writes being equal to #reads) we see a drop in speed of only 15% on the intel SSDs. That means that in the original benchmark, the SSD in a fresh state would have booted in ~38s, only 4 sec faster then a 7200HDD...something is not adding up.

Could you please measure boot times in the same manner as the original article, but in a fresh vs used state?

Thanks.

New TRIM-Tool has been released by the way. So far no data corruption (also on x64 ;) )

I will only say that I own an x25m and I have seen an improvement on boot times. Those are the only charts that I noticed were a bit odd, otherwise everything else seems to jive with what I can reproduce.

Shouldn't hardware manufacturers know MORE than tech review sites? It seems more and more often that isn't the case...

EVERY manufacturer better start PAYING ATTENTION rather than blowing off these review sites such as our beloved TR. If not, blame no one other than yourselves when you fade into obscurity...

Edit: At least in the case of Indilinx, OZC at least seems to be listening.

With platter-based hard disc drives being cheaper than ever these days, I really don't think it's very sensible to get an SSD now unless you have a gold mine. I personally would wait a few more years. By then SSDs could probably be on price parity with platter-based HDDs and have the issues worked out.

I'd say some commenters need to keep quiet, theese ppl work their ass off, and if some guys at taiwan screw up with the controller - that's not their fault.

I was with you until the abrupt leap to the partition alignment theory, without any actual test to back it up. I guess the article was rushed, which is understandable.

Looking forward to even more helpful information in the new article.

all I'm getting out of these reviews is that if you want a consumer level SSD, get an Intel X25-M :)

It's ironic that the intention of some of the OCZ forum members (like jwilliams and techspec6) could backfire. From what I can tell from their foum (http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56829), they wanted unhappy OCZ members to come to TR and criticize and bully Geoff. But that plan could blow up in their hands if some of them appreciate the perspective of a neutral author that's not tied to any vendor.

I think their own insular environment didn't help. On the first page, the forum readers see in red text, "REMEMBER THIS IS AN OFFICIAL OCZ FORUM, NO LINKS OR DISCUSSION TO COMPETITORS PRODUCTS WILL BE TOLERATED." The company certainly has the right to enforce that on their own site. But it doesn't help them keep an open mind about unexpected results.

Indilinx could soon release a firmware upgrade that fixes the demonstrated XP problems and all of this becomes irrelevant. Or some reliable, unobtrusive maintence plan (like some commenters advocated in the last article) could acceptably address the weaknesses as well. But I have to think that the OCZ's credibility has been damaged, which wouldn't have happenned (to this degree) if they didn't mention the TR review in their fourm. And it's not like this is the first weakness of OCZ SSDs that has exposed by a neutral review site; it's at least their third time.

And I won't buy their argument that XP is irrelevant. Several OCZ fourm members, including the moderator himself (who remarked about the review, "LOL what a bunch of crap" and "Who knows what unforseen bottlenecks that system might have.. eeezaly.") have XP and pre-ICH10 southbridges. The moderator's profile can't be that outdated, because he lists his three Vertex drives, which were released recently in March.

In some ways I'm happy about their involvement, and I think in the end, consumers benefited from the follow-up TR articles. Geoff's first article had some unexpected results that few, if any, could explain. But I also believe that we could have gotten an follow-up article, using a tactic that was open-minded and more respectful.

Thank you for looking deeper, it's articles like this which are going to ensure SSD's don't stay a beta product for long.

which is a much bigger margin than either the Corsair or Intel drives. The latter's performance only drops by 44%, while the former is only 15% slower

You mixed up either some percentages or some names at that part (first page). Edit: there's one "only" too many in the sentence, too.

After reading this, we can conclusively state that "tsk tsk, OCZ."

Won't constantly running the TRIM command (or some other similar OS-level command) unnecessarily write to the drive and cause it to deteriorate faster?

Also, I don't understand why SSDs have to take extra steps to read through blocks that are already written even if they're marked as deleted. Why is that so?

Having read articles here and on AnandTech about SSD performance degradation over time, what kind of usage scenario is actually necessary to run into these problems as I've been using an SSD for about 9 months as an OS and AP drive with no slowdown or performance issues.

The only thing I have noticed is the extraordinary performance increase to everyday tasks which even significant processor upgrades have never given my system in any noticeable way comparable to that given by my upgrading to an SSD.

Great article. It's apparent that consumer-level SSDs are still very much bleeding-edge tech and there are still kinks to be ironed out. Anytime you see firmware revisions drastically changing performance, such as the Intel X25-M's used performance or Anand's Indilinx drives, you know you're dealing with products not quite ready for the mainstream. Hopefully by this time next year these types of issues will be rare.

Still, I think that if, for whatever reason, you insist on using an SSD with an older operating system such as XP, it's really in your best interest to investigate the tweaks necessary for optimal performance. I understand the desirability of "plug and play" hardware, but keep in mind XP came out nearly eight years ago and is tuned for mechanical disk drives, sometimes to the detriment of SSDs. There still seems to be some dissension on how much abstraction there should be between the OS and the disk controller. "Smart" SSDs such as the X25-M can maintain good performance despite less than optimal conditions, but bring a degree of "black box" mystery. This separates the men from the boys in the controller department, but I can't help thinking it's not an ideal scenario.

In a related topic to all this controversy with current SSDs: perhaps it is time for a new file system. NTFS (and almost every other file system in use today) has been optimized for rotational media and its performance characteristics. I imagine if file system engineers were to example flash memory's performance characteristics and build a new file system intended for SSDs, you would get a very different file system implementation.

I'm sure people are working on this right now, in fact.

Windows XP has a 62% market share. Vista has a 23% share. Based on this and the results of this review it looks like SSDs are nowhere near ready for mainstream use.

The bleeding-edge crowd doesn't seem to realize this. Some idiots want to move over to Windows 7 testing even!

I was going to say something less than flattering about going through all this retesting on the same platform until I read the last paragraph. I hope to see those results soon and it's not clear but I hope you're going to use new hardware in addition to a new OS. One of the guys in the last article comments said that there may be problems with ICH7 despite it supposedly being identical to later ICH. Doing both new OS+old hardware and new OS+newer hardware would be best to cover all single variable chagnes :)

I think TR could put a lot of these OCZ-forum-users criticisms to rest by simply installing Windows 7 RC and measure what the fresh vs used delta is there. If the Indilinx controller continues to perform poorly with Win7's TRIM support Indilinx has zero arguments left.

Plus I'm personally curious what the performance is like under Windows 7 because that is what I've been running since the Win7 beta was released on Technet. For me, Vista and XP are just historical curiosities. :)

Great article and investigation afterward. This is what the TR is all about. Keep on bringing the interesting tests.

Just so I'm clear, the current thinking is that the offset of WinXp is what is causing the poor Indilinx results?

Perhaps I missed this...?

... man am I glad I waited and am still waiting before buying an SSD.

Hate to say this but these benchmark results are irrelevant because the current Vertex firmware version is V1.10. Maybe you guys should have redone the benchmarks before posting the article?

So during the first review and/or the second one, was the Vertex ever tested with the recommended 64 sector alignment?

If not, will it be tested as such in the upcoming review?