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OCZ Vector 150 SSD Review: A New Flagship With 19 nm Flash
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1. Meet The Vector 150, OCZ's New Flagship SSD

If you're a fan of conference calls, then you probably already know that OCZ isn't in the same rosy position it has been in years past. Fortunately, its enterprise-oriented offerings are really helping the company's bottom line. But the situation is darker on the desktop. It's still in the position of needing to source NAND from the fabs manufacturing it, which means it's paying more for the flash it uses and perhaps unable to ship as many units as it'd like.

But again, if you listen to earnings calls, you might already know all of this. What's important today is that OCZ is revisiting client storage with the Vector 150.

The original Vector employed 25 nm flash, and it proved to be a potent contender based on OCZ's Barefoot 3 platform. As time passes, however, it's not always possible to continue a drive family based on the same components. Like Intel with its SSD 530 and OCZ with the Vertex 3.20, transitioning from 25 nm NAND to newer 20 nm memory was important for economic reasons.

Obviously, Intel doesn't have a problem getting its hands on the latest in solid-state technology. That's one of the benefits of owning a fab. This isn't as easy of a problem for OCZ to address, though. Fortunately, the company has its hands on Toshiba's 19 nm Toggle-mode flash, which we already know to be fast.

How about OCZ's naming? Its Vertex 4 was superseded by the Vertex 450. The added 50 indicated a half-node step up on the evolutionary ladder. When we apply the same logic to the Vector (let's call the original Vector 1, for simplicity's sake), the Vector 150 is our result.

Ideally, we'll see this latest generation enjoy wider availability and a more attractive price, triggered by 19 nm NAND. Of course, because the drive launched last week, we can compare the original Vector to OCZ's Vector 150. At least right out of the gate, you'll find last generation's 128 GB model selling for less than its successor at the same capacity point. Naturally, then, you're going to see us compare old to new in an effort to assess the advantages baked into Vector 150.

Inside OCZ's Vector 150

Because this is a product refresh, it isn't surprising that OCZ is shipping its Vector 150 in the same capacities as the original. Or at least they're close, since the 150 employs some additional over-provisioning. There's the 240 GB model we're testing today, a 120 GB variant, and a 480 GB flavor. Here's the breakdown of their specifications:

OCZ Vector 150
120 GB
240 GB
480 GB
Max Sequential Reads/Writes
550 MB/s, 450 MB/s
550 MB/s, 530 MB/s
550 MB/s, 530 MB/s
Max Random 4 KB Read (IOPS)
80,000
90,000
100,000
Max Random 4 KB Write (IOPS)95,000
95,00095,000
Controller
Indilinx Barefoot 3 IDX500M00-BC
Warranty
Five Years
NAND
19 nm Toshiba Toggle
Price (Newegg)
$135
$240
$490

Those are the basics. In addition, OCZ's retail box includes a 3.5" adapter sled for desktop installations, along with a product key for Acronis True Image to facilitate drive cloning (this is the same software we use in our lab to replicate a standardized benchmark image). Acronis offers oodles of other features too, including some solid backup options.

OCZ's metal chassis and thermal padOCZ's metal chassis and thermal pad

Before we pop the top on this SSD, it's worth mentioning that OCZ's higher-end offerings sport the best chassis in the business. Some of its lower-end drives ship with simple plastic enclosures on a metal base, but the Vector 150 is just awesome. Its seven-millimeter-tall housing is both good-looking and heavy enough to inspire confidence. That's not great for super-light laptops, but it's what we enjoy for an enthusiast-oriented desktop. Crack the case open and we're granted access to the SSD's PCB.

The biggest change you see in going from the Vector to the Vector 150 is the latter's 19 nm ABL Toshiba Toggle-mode flash replacing 25 nm NAND. Our sample ships with eight dual-die packages per side, totaling 256 GB. Each die is manufactured at 64 Gb density.

Another tweak is extra over-provisioning. The 25 nm-equipped Vector was rated for 20 GB of host writes per day for five years. OCZ's Vector 150 is rated for no less than 50 GB per day. That's primarily due to a reduction in write amplification. It does throw off the price per gigabyte comparison, making Vector 150 more expensive per addressable gig. But the extra over-provisioning above and beyond ~7% of spare area is a reasonable tradeoff. Just be aware that the 50 GB/day specification isn't a fully random, full-span write. OCZ instead characterizes those 50 GB as "typical client conditions".

At the heart of OCZ's Vector 150 lies the company's own Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller. The IDX500M00-BC is the same silicon found in the original Vector. The Vertex 450 uses a lower-clocked variant, but also boasts features not available from the Vector, like AES-256 encryption. The Vector 150 enables that missing functionality, though it's unclear whether it comes from firmware or enhancements to the processor itself.

Finally, we find 512 MB of Micron DDR3-1600 CL11 DRAM. Each side of the PCB sports 256 MB, giving us 2 MB per gigabyte of on-board flash. The 120 and 480 GB variants will probably come with 128 MB and 1024 MB, respectively.

2. Test Setup and Benchmarks

Our consumer storage test bench is based on Intel's Z77 Platform Controller Hub paired with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. Intel's 6- and 7-series chipsets are virtually identical from a storage perspective. We're standardizing on older RST 10.6.1002 drivers for the foreseeable future.

Changes in RST's driver packages occasionally result in subtle performance changes. They can also lead to some truly profound variance in scores and results as well, depending on the driver revision. Some versions flush writes more or less frequently. Others work better in RAID situations. In fact, builds 11.2 and newer support TRIM in RAID as well. Regardless, results obtained with one revision may or may not be comparable to results obtained with another, so sticking with one version across all testing is mandatory.

Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
MotherboardGigabyte G1.Sniper M3
MemoryG.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V
System Drive Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02
Drive(s) Under Test
OCZ Vector 150 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.1
Comparison DrivesIntel SSD 530 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: DC12

Intel SSD 520 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 400i

Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA, Firmware: LLKi

SanDisk A110 256 GB M.2 PCIe x2, Firmware: A200100

Silicon Motion SM226EN 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M0709A

Crucial M500 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 960 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

SanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200

SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200

Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q

Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q

SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311

SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311

SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311

Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660

Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s

Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2

OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25

OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0

OCZ Vertex 450 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.0

Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q

Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F

Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02

 Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206
Graphics
MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB
Power Supply
Seasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold
Chassis
Lian Li Pitstop
RAID
LSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK
System Software and Drivers
Operating
System
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectX
DirectX 11
Drivers
Graphics: Nvidia 314.07
RST: 10.6.1002
IMEI: 7.1.21.1124
Generic AHCI: MSAHCI.SYS
Benchmarks
Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0
Trace-Based 
Iometer 1.1.0# Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling
PCMark 7
Secondary Storage Suite
PCM Vantage
Storage Suite
Custom Scripts
Performance vs. Capacity
3. Results: 128 KB Sequential Performance

Fantastic sequential read and write performance is a trademark of modern SSDs. To measure it, we use incompressible data over a 16 GB LBA space, then test at queue depths from one to 16. We're reporting these numbers in binary (where 1 KB equals 1024) instead of decimal numbers (where 1 KB is 1000 bytes). When necessary, we're also limiting the scale of the chart to enhance readability.

128 KB Sequential Read

It's not necessary to spend much time talking about the sequential performance achieved by these three OCZ drives; they're fast. In fact, most of the time, they're quicker than almost everything else subject to the same SATA limitations.

128 KB Sequential Write

Again, there just isn't much reason to speak to the Vector 150's sequential speed. The interesting stuff comes later. Based on this testing, the Vector 150 is as fast as the Vector, and both are faster than any other SATA 6Gb/s drive.

For what its worth, the evolution of OCZ's line-up, from the Everest-based Vertex 4 to the Barefoot 3-powered Vector 150, is interesting. Whatever OCZ is doing is working. But like SanDisk's Extreme II, Samsung's EVO, and a few other offerings that employ various methods to emulate SLC using MLC flash, you don't get those performance levels all of the time. They are evident usually though, and their effects are profound.

Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 128 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer:

The Vector and Vector 150 take second and third place, just below the awesome M.2 PCIe-based SanDisk A110. If sequential performance is all you care about, OCZ's drives are clearly spectacular. Or are they? Aggravatingly, the answer depends. More on this shortly. For now, we move to 4 KB random performance.

4. Results: 4 KB Random Performance

We turn to Iometer as our synthetic metric of choice for testing 4 KB random performance. Technically, "random" translates to a consecutive access that occurs more than one sector away. On a mechanical hard disk, this can lead to significant latencies that hammer performance. Spinning media simply handles sequential accesses much better than random ones, since the heads don't have to be physically repositioned. With SSDs, the random/sequential access distinction is much less relevant. Data are put wherever the controller wants it, so the idea that the operating system sees one piece of information next to another is mostly just an illusion.

4 KB Random Reads

Testing the performance of SSDs often emphasizes 4 KB random reads, and for good reason. Most system accesses are both small and random. Moreover, read performance is arguably more important than writes when you're talking about typical client workloads.

The original Vector hits the magic 100,000 IOPS threshold. The Vertex 450 and Vector 150 can't quite get there, falling just south of 90,000. Maximum numbers are found in the chart below, but this is clearly the older Vector's ballgame. The newer Vector 150 just doesn't achieve quite the same performance level at high queue depths. Granted, at the lower queue depths most desktop tasks push, the results are fundamentally identical.

4 KB Random Writes

Random write performance is also important. Early SSDs didn't do well in this discipline, seizing up even in light workloads. Newer SSDs wield more than 100x the performance of drives from 2007, though we also recognize that there's a point of diminishing returns in desktop environments.

When you swap a hard drive out for solid-state storage, your experience improves. Load times, boot times, and system responsiveness all get better. When it's called upon, your SSD can handle a lot more I/O than the spinning media you had in there before. When it comes to typical client workloads however, getting to those operations faster is what matters, not necessarily trying to juggle more of them.

In our testing, all three OCZ SSDs level off after 90,000 IOPS. But performance at lower queue depths is, again, excellent.

Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 4 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer. The order the drives appear in our chart is determined by maximum combined read and write performance.

In retrospect, the original Vector doesn't get enough credit for its speed. It achieves a first-place finish, edging out the powerful 840 Pro. OCZ's Vector 150 slots in a couple of spots lower, while Vertex 450 falls in a few spots below that. This is a trend you'll see again before this review is over. In essence, the Vector 150 falls in between the original Vector and older Vertex 450.

5. Results: The Vector 150's Performance Quirks

Performance Vs. Capacity

I really like HDTune Pro. It's a decent canned storage test full of helpful tools. The utility is great for evaluating hard drives, and a little less relevant to SSDs. The software's most prominent feature is its ability to write and read to the entire surface of a storage device. When you're testing rotating media, it's easy to observe speed dropping as measured from the outer to inner tracks. That's just physics. With SSDs, the "surface" is the drive's entire capacity, minus over-provisioning or spare area.

Now, there are good reasons to use HDTune for reviewing SSDs, but there are serious limitations to be aware of as well. Most strikingly, HDTune writes in easily compressible zero-fill data, which isn't particularly useful for testing SandForce's technology. Also, I want more control over how the utility does its job. So, I created my own script-based version to do what I need.

This little tool is especially helpful for testing OCZ's newer offerings because they are able to take the capacity of a given drive and use it in a way that emulates single-level cell NAND in a manner of speaking. We think the mechanism works with faster pages for as long as it can, delaying the use of slower pages. This is why the Vector, Vertex450, Vertex 4, and Agility 4 prefer to write to the faster half of the flash. It's easiest to demonstrate that unique behavior by charting performance over capacity.

Starting with a freshly erased drive, we write to the entire capacity and display our results as a percentage of the capacity. I separate the 240 GB SSD into sequential chunks 1/200th of the total capacity. Then, each segment's average throughput is displayed as a data point representing 0.5% percent of the "surface". In this case, the Vertex 3.20 and Vector 150 are the same size (240 GB), while the Vertex 450 and Vector are 256 GB. The larger the addressable capacity, the more bytes it takes to equal one 0.5% chunk.

We want to write sequentially, so we're sticking with 1024 KB access sizes and a queue depth of one. Higher queue depth activity isn't always truly sequential in the strictest sense of the word.

From the beginning, OCZ's Vector, Vector 150, and Vertex 450 are neck and neck until just past the 50% mark. After that, the Vector 150 extends even further before dropping into sub-200 MB/s territory. Once all of the fast pages are gone, the drive has to write to the slower-to-program pages that comprise half of the flash. Once the speed stabilizes again, the Vector 150 outpaces (by a few MB/s) the Vector, which in turn is above the Vertex 450.

Also included in our chart is the Vertex 3.20. OCZ's 240 GB SandForce-based drive is being fed random data. But notice the lack of performance variation as the drive is written. Also, the Vertex 3.20 falls right around the average speed of OCZ's Indilinx-infused SSDs if you consider their whole capacity. This is a good reality check that represents the behavior of most other drives.

Theoretically, if we were to fill 60% percent of the drive with real files (say an operating system and a few games), the SSD would write that data as quickly as possible to the faster pages. Then, over time, it'd shuffle around that data, freeing up some portion of the remaining faster pages for new tasks. We can't say for certain that the process works this way; OCZ is tight-lipped about its mechanism, and we're left with educated guesses.

So why does the Vector 150 maintain its excellent performance longer than the other two Barefoot-based SSDs? The answer lies in the additional over-provisioning. The Vector 150 uses 16 GB more over-provisioning than the Vector and Vertex 450. Sixteen gigabytes is 6.25% of 256 GB, so it's possible that the Vector 150 can go around 6% deeper without slowing down to sub-200 MB/s levels.

6. Results: The Vector 150's Performance Quirks, Continued

Again, starting from a fresh drive, we write sequentially to each gigabyte. As soon as that's done, we begin the write-oriented test a fraction of a second later. That way, all of the addressable capacity is filled, compensating for the behavior some drives demonstrate when reading from a securely erased drive. In a nutshell, many SSDs know that there is no data to read, and just send the data onward. The whole truth is a little more complicated, but in general, you only want to read from sectors that actually contain data, which is why our Iometer testing is performed to a test file.

In this case, we get to see how each drive reads sequentially across its capacity with a 1024 KB read at a queue depth of one, segment by segment.

The SF-2281 processor at the heart of OCZ's Vertex 3.20 again churns out results consistently. Although they're lower than what we might have expected, this is because the data on the drive is incompressible.

As we shift over to the drives armed with Barefoot 3 controllers, we see that performance isn't as high in back as it was up front. Fortunately, the Vector 150 suffers less after the halfway point than the original Vector and Vertex 450. Those two drives get walloped; they're penalized in a similar way with reads as they were in our write testing. It's tempting to think that they're busy doing something else after 50%, but we think the reads are simply coming from slower pages.

We don't have a great hypothesis for the Vector 150's resilience to lower read speeds, but it clearly fares better than the Vector and Vertex 450.

Random Performance Over Time

A saturation test consists of writing to a drive for a specific duration with a defined workload. Technically, this is an enterprise-class write saturation test, where the entire LBA space of the SSD is utilized by a random write at high queue depths.

OCZ is keen to point out that the over-provisioned Vector 150 fares better during prolonged periods of random writes. That over-provisioning helps the Vector 150 shoulder 50 GB of random writes per day, spread out over its five-year warranty. This is largely attributable to a reduction in write amplification, since on-the-fly garbage collection algorithms are more effective with extra space to work in.

We're only showing six hours of writes here, since the Vector 150 enters a steady state quickly thanks to its lower capacity and high performance. I'm also including the original 256 GB Vector, manually over-provisioned to the same level as the Vector 150.

First, we see that the Vector 150 is capable of much higher steady state 4 KB performance at a queue depth of 32 than the Vector. Even over-provisioned similarly, the Vector 150 manages a laudable 21,000 IOPS. The Vector can't match it, since it still has to map the over-provisioned capacity, which incurs additional overhead.

Looking at the breakout showing 20 minutes of writes in single-second slices, there is still moderate variation. But the average still works out to about 21,000 IOPS.

7. Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench

Storage Bench v1.0 (Background Info)

Our Storage Bench incorporates all of the I/O from a trace recorded over two weeks. The process of replaying this sequence to capture performance gives us a bunch of numbers that aren't really intuitive at first glance. Most idle time gets expunged, leaving only the time that each benchmarked drive was actually busy working on host commands. So, by taking the ratio of that busy time and the the amount of data exchanged during the trace, we arrive at an average data rate (in MB/s) metric we can use to compare drives.

It's not quite a perfect system. The original trace captures the TRIM command in transit, but since the trace is played on a drive without a file system, TRIM wouldn't work even if it were sent during the trace replay (which, sadly, it isn't). Still, trace testing is a great way to capture periods of actual storage activity, a great companion to synthetic testing like Iometer.

Incompressible Data and Storage Bench v1.0

Also worth noting is the fact that our trace testing pushes incompressible data through the system's buffers to the drive getting benchmarked. So, when the trace replay plays back write activity, it's writing largely incompressible data. If we run our storage bench on a SandForce-based SSD, we can monitor the SMART attributes for a bit more insight.

Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB
SMART Attributes
RAW Value Increase
#242 Host Reads (in GB)
84 GB
#241 Host Writes (in GB)
142 GB
#233 Compressed NAND Writes (in GB)
149 GB

Host reads are greatly outstripped by host writes to be sure. That's all baked into the trace. But with SandForce's inline deduplication/compression, you'd expect that the amount of information written to flash would be less than the host writes (unless the data is mostly incompressible, of course). For every 1 GB the host asked to be written, Mushkin's drive is forced to write 1.05 GB.

If our trace replay was just writing easy-to-compress zeros out of the buffer, we'd see writes to NAND as a fraction of host writes. This puts the tested drives on a more equal footing, regardless of the controller's ability to compress data on the fly.

Average Data Rate

The Storage Bench trace generates more than 140 GB worth of writes during testing. Obviously, this tends to penalize drives smaller than 180 GB and reward those with more than 256 GB of capacity.

Not to sound like a broken record, but the same trend continues as we look at average data rate results. The original Vector earns its top billing, while the newer Vector 150 takes fourth place. OCZ's Vertex 450 lands in sixth place, which is a an altogether respectable finish.

The Vector 150 does end up closer to the Vertex 450 than the original Vector, despite (or perhaps because of) its 19 nm Toggle-mode flash and the Vector's Barefoot 3 silicon. I personally put more stock in mean service time as a measure of storage performance though, for reasons outlined on the next page. So, let's check out that metric.

8. Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench, Continued

Service Times

Beyond the average data rate reported on the previous page, there's even more information we can collect from Tom's Hardware's Storage Bench. For instance, mean (average) service times show what responsiveness is like on an average I/O during the trace.

It would be difficult to graph the 10+ million I/Os that make up our test, so looking at the average time to service an I/O makes more sense. For a more nuanced idea of what's transpiring during the trace, we plot mean service times for reads against writes. That way, drives with better latency show up closer to the origin; lower numbers are better.

Write latency is simply the total time it takes an input or output operation to be issued by the host operating system, travel to the storage subsystem, commit to the storage device, and have the drive acknowledge the operation. Read latency is similar. The operating system asks the storage device for data stored in a certain location, the SSD reads that information, and then it's sent to the host. Modern computers are fast and SSDs are zippy, but there's still a significant amount of latency involved in a storage transaction.

OCZ's refreshed Vector drive falls behind even the Vertex 450 in terms of write latency, though that margin is imperceptible, and only something we pick up due to the righteously large nature of this chart. Remember, the further south and west a drive appears, the better. 

And yes, once again, the Vector 150 falls right between the Vector and Vertex 450. Not highlighted, but also of interest, OCZ's Vertex 3.20 240 GB appears just below the Vertex 450 in our trace's read service times, but far behind in writes. Both of those drives employ 20 nm ONFi NAND, though the Vertex 450 gets the advantage of a different processor and OCZ's performance mode/storage mode technology.

I'm highlighting all of the OCZ drives, but it's easy to imagine where the drives fall without the entirety of this chart. The Vertex 3.20 shows up right in the middle of the field, a few thousandths of a second per I/O behind the Vertex 450, which in turn is a few thousandths behind the Vertex 150. In second place, just behind Samsung's magnum opus, is the original Vector.

Mean write service times are more varied, resulting in more separation in the chart at the top of this page. It's telling that the podium is dominated by OCZ, with the Vector and Vertex 450 followed by its new Vector 150. The gold, silver, and bronze contenders aren't distinguished by much, but a difference does exist.

9. Results: PCMark 7 And PCMark Vantage

Futuremark's PCMark 7: Secondary Storage Suite

PCMark 7 uses the same trace-based technology as our Storage Bench v1.0 for its storage suite testing. It employs a geometric mean scoring system to generate a composite, so we end up with PCMarks instead of a megabytes per second. One-thousand points separate the top and bottom, but that encompasses a far larger difference than the score alone indicates.

This test is a big improvement over the older PCMark Vantage, at least for SSD benchmarking. The storage suite is comprised of several small traces. At the end, the geometric mean of those scores is scaled with a number representing the test system's speed. The scores generated are much different from PCMark Vantage, and many manufacturers are predisposed to dislike it for that reason. It's hard to figure out how PCMark 7 "works" because it uses a sliding scale to generate scores. Still, it represents one of the best canned benchmarks for storage, and if nothing else, it helps reinforce the idea that the differences in modern SSD performance don't necessarily amount to a better user experience in average consumer workloads.

Instead of showing the post-processed PCMark 7 scores, this chart reflects percentages relative to the fastest drive tested (in this test's case, that's Samsung's 840 Pro 256 GB). Our interpretation isn't earth-shattering, but it likely is more meaningful than raw benchmark results.

Fire up PCMark 7 and the status quo strikes back. Except, this time, OCZ's Vertex 3 bests the Vertex 450. The Vector 150 falls to the original Vector.

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage: Hard Drive Suite

PCMark's Vantage isn't the paragon of SSD testing, mainly because it's old and wasn't designed for the massive performance solid-state technology enables. Intended to exploit the new features in Windows Vista, Vantage was certainly at the forefront of consumer storage benching at the time. Vantage works by taking the geometric mean of composite storage scores and then scaling them a lot like PCMark 7 does. But in Vantage's case, this scaling is achieved by arbitrarily multiplying the geometric sub-score mean by 214.65. That scaling factor is supposed to represent an average test system of the day (a system that's now close to a decade behind the times). PCMark 7 improves on this by creating a unique system-dependent scaling factor and newer trace technology. 

Why bother including this metric, then? A lot of folks prefer Vantage in spite of or because of the cartoonish scores and widespread adoption. That, and the fact that most every manufacturer uses the aged benchmark in box specs and reviewer-specific guidelines. In fairness, Vantage's Hard Drive suite wasn't designed with SSDs in mind, and is actually quite good as pointing out which 5400 RPM mechanical disk might be preferable.

Break out the Moët, because the Vector 150 finally demonstrates a finish that trumps OCZ's other offerings. Granted, it bests the first-gen Vector by a slim 1.01%, but still, a win is a win.

Less enthusiasm-generating is the fact that OCZ's new flagship is bested by four 128 GB-class drives, seven 256 GB SSDs, a trio of 512 GB-class models, and Samsung's EVO 1000 GB. Then again, PCMark Vantage is no longer the most brilliant indicator of general performance.

10. Results: File Copy Performance

Microsoft's Robocopy, a CLI directory replication command, gradually replaced the older xcopy. It's multi-threaded, has a ton of options, and generally outperforms vanilla Windows copy operations. Best of all, it's built right in to Redmond's operating system. Especially useful for network copy operations and backups, Robocopy doesn't stop to ask you one hundred questions while it copies over your music collection, either.

The reality of benchmarking file copy performance is that you need something fast to move data from and fast hardware to move it to. This is most important with SSDs. It doesn't matter if your drive can write sequentially at 500 MB/s if the source files are hosted on a USB 2.0-attached external hard drive. We're copying our test files from an Intel SSD DC S3700 to the drives in the chart below, taking source speed out of the equation (mostly). Moving to faster storage would increase the faster test disks' ultimate file copy performance. It begs the question though -- what is the point? Most users copying data from one source to another (in this case, a SSD) won't have the benefit of copying from a SSD RAID array or PCIe-based solid state storage, so relying on just one SSD as the source gives us the best case average.

There are 9065 files comprising the 16.2 GB payload. Some of the files are huge (up to 2 GB), while others are best described as tiny. On average, that's around 1.8 MB per file. The files are a mix of music, program, pictures, and random file types.

It's fair to say that this chart would look much different if we were copying from a hard drive to a SSD. Even if the disk drive's sequential throughput wasn't a bottleneck, it'd still choke on the smaller files.

As we saw in Vantage, the now-available Vector 150 beats its predecessor. Don't break out the confetti yet though; the way we perform our file copy test typically compresses the faster drives. Why? Simple. We're copying from one SSD to another. If we wanted to know in absolute terms how snappy the file copy operation is, we'd want to copy from something faster than a single SSD. Nevertheless, the Vertex 150 still scores a win over its predecessors.

11. Results: Power Consumption

Idle Power Consumption

Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers far less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.

Active idle power numbers are critical, especially when it comes to their impact on mobile platforms. Idle means different things on different systems, though. Pretty much every drive we're testing is capable of one or more low-power states, up to and including DevSleep. That last feature is a part of the SATA 3.2 host specification. And while it requires a capable SSD and a compatible platform, enabling it takes power consumption down to a very small number. This is why we test active idle; it's easy to identify, and is still where SSDs spend most of their time.

Despite using the Vector's controller, the Vector 150 demonstrates active idle power consumption identical to the Vertex 450. True, that's only eight-tenths of a watt, but that difference isn't an error in measurement. It's always there. And OCZ did tell us to expect ever so-slightly lower idle power, which is exactly what we see. This isn't on the same level as Samsung, Intel, SanDisk, and Plextor, which are even more conservative, but it's still a respectable outcome.

PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption

If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Maximum power may spike fiercely, but the usage seen during a PCMark 7 run is pretty light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor" between peaks of varying intensity.

Average power figures fall where we'd expect them, as the new Vector 150 and older Vertex 450 nearly tie. The former flagship Vector averages a few tenths higher.

Let's plot the log data for more detail.

At this scale, the minute idle power differences between drives aren't even noticeable. What we do see is that the original Vector uses more juice at various points than OCZ's SSDs with sub-25 nm NAND.

Maximum Observed Power Consumption

Sure enough, the Vector 150 shows us the lowest power consumption amongst OCZ's offerings at maximum load. This isn't as big of a win as you might think, though. It's not that maximum power use isn't important. But a client-oriented SSD spends so little time in that state. An extra watt or two every so often typically isn't going to make an appreciable different.

12. We Love Performance, But Also Want More Value

There was once a time when OCZ was synonymous with SSDs. The company sold much of the enthusiast community its first solid-state devices in products like the Vertex and Agility. But then the plankton bloomed, and now industry whales like Samsung, Micron, Intel, Toshiba, and SanDisk are feasting. The market is still growing prodigiously, but somehow keeps getting smaller for the companies without their own flash production capabilities. OCZ doesn't have the resources to open its own NAND fab, but it has acquired the intellectual property to tackle SSDs from the other end. It's a strategy we've seen work well in the enterprise, but hasn't necessarily been as successful on the desktop, where price sensitivity erodes its ability to make money.

As many companies are learning, the move to <20 nm-class NAND isn't kind to OCZ's Vector 150. If anything, though, that's primarily an artifact of the original Vector's smoking performance. The Vector 150 retains most of that as it embraces the latest manufacturing node that should be more readily available for longer. This is a win if you dig what OCZ is doing with its drives. But if you weren't a fan of the original, then the Vector 150 isn't going to change your mind. It's quite similar, with high-end performance and a price tag to match. Again, the 240 GB model sells for $250, the 120 GB version is being offered at $135, and the 480 GB SSD commands $490.

For anyone keeping score at home, the Vector 150 falls in just ahead of the Vertex 450 in our benchmarks. OCZ really disagrees on that point, but going by the tests we run, its Vector 150 is like a slightly faster version of the Vertex 450, itself a marginally slower version of the original Vector. All three are similar, but last generation's Vector is mostly above the new drive's performance. We don't necessarily see this as an issue, given the original's raw speed. However, we really wanted to see more aggressive pricing.

So, OCZ's current desktop-oriented line-up consists of three primary offerings: the Vector, the Vertex 450, and the new Vector 150. It just doesn't make sense for the company to do battle in the value-oriented space given its fiscal situation and competition from manufacturers with fabs. In a smaller pool, OCZ is looking to charge more for faster, higher-performance solutions. The trouble is that most enthusiasts are going to be perfectly happy with a 240 GB SSD that sells for $70 less than a 240 GB Vector 150. Small performance advantages over more mainstream offerings make it difficult to justify higher prices. The same caveat applies to other companies selling high-performance SSDs attached to bottlenecked 6 Gb/s interfaces. But OCZ has to go where the enthusiast money is, even if that means catering to a smaller audience.