Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage Storage Test
Overall, PCMark Vantage seems to actually like the 25 nm Vertex 2 drive better, going so far as to demonstrate a significant gain from upgrading OCZ's 1.11 firmware to 1.29 on the 34 nm-based SSD.
The tests that comprise PCMark’s HDD suite are much more difficult to interpret with regularity. Nevertheless, this is as close as we get to real-world workloads reflecting SSD performance.
Our results seem to be all over the place, ranging from exceptionally positive in favor of the new Vertex 2 to slightly disappointing. None of the scores, however, are as bad in these trace-based workloads as the CystalDiskMark numbers would have otherwise suggested.
It looks like the worst finish is in the Vista Startup Throughput metric, where the new Vertex 2 loses just over 7% of its score with the 1.29 firmware installed in the older drive. On the other hand, the best finish is in PCMark Vantage’s Windows Defender test, where the new SSD achieves a 56% improvement over its predecessor. Interestingly, both benchmarks, which use 4 KB blocks, are dominated by reads (Windows Defender is 99% reads, while Vista start-up is 84% reads).
The bottom line here is that, almost assuredly, there are more situations where the old and new Vertex 2 drives trade blows in real-world desktop environments, rather than the new drive simply hemorrhaging performance, as you might think after considering the Iometer and CDM benchmarks.
