OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS & Patriot Wildfire SSDs Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2011 4:35 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2010
To keep things consistent we've also included our older Storage Bench. Note that the old storage test system doesn't have a SATA 6Gbps controller, so we only have one result for the 6Gbps drives.
The first in our benchmark suite is a light/typical usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
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Paazel - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Do you allow your computer to sleep? I had a Vertex 2 die on me, and forum speculation led me to believe that allowing my computer to sleep may have been the culprit.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
My personal machine that it's deployed in is a notebook that is allowed to sleep (and does so) regularly.I also don't do any of the odd stability optimizations on my testbeds either. Sleep is always enabled and definitely allowed to happen (I don't always catch my testbeds after they've finished a long test so they'll go off to sleep).
While I do believe that earlier issues may have been sleep related, I'm not sure about this one in particular.
Take care,
Anand
Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Just to throw in my own $0.02, although I put my Vertex 2 in a desktop, my results are the same as what Anand has seen. My desktop hybrid sleeps regularly, and I have not encountered any issues.JasonInofuentes - Friday, June 24, 2011 - link
+1 On an Agility 2 90GB, MicroCenter Sandforce 64GB drive and Agility 2 40GB in a desktop, netbook and HTPC setting, all allowed to sleep. Indeed I blame many of my PC related issues to my inability to sleep.sam. - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
I have a 120GB Vertex with the Indilinx controller and had mine die on me after about a year and a half of average use in my laptop. (Mind you the RMA process was good, and they replaced it with a new identical SSD). I had nearly 2700 power on times (putting my laptop to sleep multiple times a day) and 3.7 terrabytes written onto the SSD before it started corrupting registry files and BSODing.To be honest, a year and a half as a lifespan seems really bad for what was a high end product, though from what I hear the Sandforce controller is better in terms of reliability. I am still willing to let my laptop sleep though, though just doing my best to write less to the SSD.
kahwaji_n - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
i don't think so, maybe if your computer hibernate a Lot then it may be the reason for that, cause when computer sleep the ram will still hold the data and little data has to be written to disk drive contrary to hibernation where the Ram will put to sleep and all data will be written back to disk drive, if you have windows 7 and SSD in raid setup (where no trim command could be pass to controller) and your computer hibernate periodically! run the index Performance in windows 7 and see how the Performance is degraded severely.iwod - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
I think the first few Graph / Charts pretty much sums up what i have been saying. With Double the Seq Read, Random Read numbers, you only get less then 10% performance difference. The bottleneck for majority of our workload has shifted back from SSD storage to CPU processing speed.Which means, the best time to get an SSD is now!, If you can afford it and the Storage space is enough for a main OS drive.
L. - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Err .. it's going to be dirt cheap pretty soon .. I wouldn't spend "GFX bucks" on a storage device tbh. (Seriously, for that price I prefer my 2TBWDgreen raid10 ... makes so much more sense even though it does not serve the same purpose...)khan321 - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Why no mention of the increased lifespan of 32nm NAND? This is a massive benefit to me over 25nm.B3an - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
Because Anand has pointed this out before. Theres absolutely nothing to worry about regarding the lifespan on 25nm with a good controller, as it would last many many decades. The nand flash will lose it's charge before this happens anyway.