OCZ Vector 256GB Solid State Drive Review

For a number of years, OCZ have been producing drives that have set not only technological milestones but also performance milestones as well. Such milestones have included being the first to debut the SandForce controller, the first 1TB SSD and in 2011 they unveiled the highest capacity SAS SSD at close to 1TB. Performance wise, OCZs have been at the forefront of what is possible and the Vertex 4 that we looked at earlier in the year was the latest to tickle our SSD tastebuds and show us why OCZ are one of the best in their class. The acquisition of Indilinx last year was a huge step forward in the companies history and this has meant that overall manufacturing costs have come down thus giving the end user a top level drive but at an even more affordable price. Since this acquisition, the Barefoot 3 controller is the first ground up design that they have created, tailored entirely to their specifications and this means that they can take performance to the next level, so now couldn't be a better time to bring out a new line of drives. OCZ have made this line of drives with not performance or price first in line, but quality, reliability and stability. This is not to say that they're going to be B grade in relation to the Vertex drives. Performance is still high on the agenda and following the hype that the Vector has been getting, its time to see of OCZ can set another milestone and release a new yardstick to the SSD market. Like any other OCZ SSD that we have seen since the dawn of time, their preferred packaging method has not changes single bit; after all, if its not broken, why fix it? Over on the other side we get a run down on the Vector drive and a excerpt in a number of languages. The screws and 2.5" to 3.5" drive tray that we find with OCZ drives has set the standard and is the same as we have found with virtually every OCZ drive. The only part of the OCZ standard kit that we find differs with the Vector is based around the paperwork and sticker. Whilst the installation manual is the same, the sticker has been updated to a new design and we also find a set of information included for the Acronis software the comes bundled with the drive, along with it 64 character activation key. The Vector comes with an edge-to-edge label on the top with a simple yet stylish design with purely the manufacturer, model name and reference to the Indilinx controller thats inside. On the underside of the drive a sticker holds all information relating to the drive with model and serial numbers and other compulsory regulatory info. Lowering the profile of drives is becoming a common trend that we have seen a lot more recently. The Vector is another drive to follow this trend with the slimmer build at only 7mm thick. Whilst this means the the drive can fit into slimmer spaces such as ultra-books, it also means that less material is needed to manufacture the case , thus reducing overall costs in the long run. Taking a look the PCB, we find the upper half populated with eight NAND ICs, the drive controller and one of two 256Mb DDR3 chip. On the lower half of the board we find eight more NAND ICs along with the second 256MB DDR3 memory IC and to the lower left of the PCB, the circuits for power delivery and control. Looking a little closer at the flash ICs, we can see that OCZ have used their own branded NAND flash, although the part number does refer to an identical IC made by Intel/Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT). Each of the 25nm chips pack 16GB of storage, totalling 256GB with the 16 chips on this board. At the heart of the drive is the all new IDZ500M00-BC Barefoot 3 Indilinx controller which is totally designed and built by OCZ meaning that the performance of this drive is completely tailored and optimised to OCZ's specifications. Test system: Intel DZ77GA-70K Intel Core i7 3770k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB AMD Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD 3 x AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AS SSD ATTO CrystalDiskMark Anvil's Storage Utilities RC5 IOMeter The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read a 1GB file to write respectively. From the go the Vector gives some outstanding results with read speeds well over 500Mb/s and write speeds just knocking on the door of 500Mb/s, we also find a very high set of results for the 4K-64Thrd tests as well with speeds around and over 300MB/s. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The Barefoot 3 controller pushes the drive speeds to the limits, with write speeds of over 500Mb/s found as early on as the 64Kb interval and at 128Mb for read.CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enable you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) CDM gives even better results to what we saw in AS SSD with both sequential read and writes easily over 500MB/s and 4K over 320MB/s. 512K results were also some of the highest that we've seen.Anvil's Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, its completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Setting Anvil's to 100% compression we do not a drop in read speeds, by around 50MB/s. Changing to 0% compression we do find the read speeds come back to where they should be, but in the real world there should be little difference in speeds experienced due to the design of the controller. IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the 'Maximum Disk Size', 'Starting Disk Sector' and '# of Outstanding I/Os'. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the 'Access Specifications' configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are: Transfer Request Size Percent Random/Sequential distribution. Percent Read/Write Distribution Aligned I/O's. Reply Size TCP/IP status Burstiness. Looking at the read IOPs to start, the Vector tops out at just under 93k, putting it just under the 100k rated limit. Write IOPs experienced were a lot lower than the rated speed when set to random access, but we did find them increase closer to the rated 95k when IOMeter was set to sequential writing. Up to the point where I got the Vector on our test bench, the Vertex 4 was one of the yard sticks so to say that we marked all other drives on the market against, based on its performance all round and no matter what we threw at it. The Vector though has now re-written the rule book and it looks like we've got ourselves a brand new yard stick to measure against. The Barefoot 3 controller as mentioned is an all OCZ design and with its first deployment in the Vector line of drives proving to be so successful, I wouldn't be too surprised if we see this controller pop up in the Vertex 5 if it comes to light or any other future drives. Until now, IOPs is not something that we have measured on SSDs purely because we didn't feel they were a highly important factor in the choice the end user was making when choosing a drive over say read and write performance. As times are changing and the speeds that drives are achieving are starting to hit the upper limits of what is possible under current SATA standards with regards to bandwidth, we find the focus being shifted to other aspects of drive features and specifications to find the cream of the crop. Depending on the end users needs, IOPs can be highly important and for example when rendering video can make a huge difference in render times. Another thing that I would point out that puts the Barefoot 3 controller over any other SandForce drive is the need to not lose any capacity as part of preventing a dip in performance when the drive gets to a fully used state. The BF3 controller handles and prevents the dip in performance in a completely new way and this is totally handled on the controller itself. Any of you that have worries over this, should need not worry, but even still OCZ still include a massive 5 year warranty as well. The Vectors ability to push out not only a high level of bandwidth but also some of the highest IOPs levels that we have seen mentioned in the drive specifications, ticks two of the biggest boxes going and even the price is remarkable at around £0.80/GB considering this is a high performance drive. OCZ though didn't want this to be a drive focussed on price. Quality comes first and that has been made clear, with price and performance coming next to offer a top drive with a fair price point. Bottom line, OCZ have pushed the bar up once again and the first new controller to come from Indilinx following their acquisition by OCZ and its integration into the Vector is proving so far to be a big success, giving us the all new yard-stick to play with.