The OCZ Vertex 2 Conspiracy: Lost Space, Lost Speed?
Several readers contacted me in the past two weeks, complaining about OCZ's recent adoption of 25 nm NAND and its effect on the capacity and performance of certain SSDs that they expected to be both larger and faster. I bought my own drives to compare.
Benchmark Results: 4 KB and 512 KB Random Reads
The delta between these two drives is relatively small with a queue depth of one—expected given the fact that we’re hardly exploiting the parallelism of a modern high-end SSD’s architecture. At the other extreme, pushing more concurrent requests bolsters performance across the board. However, the fact that we’re using 4 KB blocks of data is what really hammers the new Vertex 2 and its 25 nm NAND.
My theoretical explanation makes more sense next to the following chart, with the same test using 512 KB reads. Suddenly, the overhead is nowhere near as severe, and we see the new Vertex 2 faring much better, surpassing the older drive, in fact.
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Mushkin.com have a letter posted on the website that they will not be going to 25nm as the drives life cycle is less than half that of a 3*nm drive. Also the performance is not there.Reply
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cangelini LeekayMushkin.com have a letter posted on the website that they will not be going to 25nm as the drives life cycle is less than half that of a 3*nm drive. Also the performance is not there.Reply
Depending on supply of 34 nm NAND, that's probably not a sustainable position to take. IMFT isn't going to decide to shift back to 34 nm.
At the risk of contradicting myself, Intel will be using 34 nm NAND on its next-gen 6 Gb/s Elmcrest drives. It's not like the flash isn't disappearing entirely, but the vendors making the switch seem to be motivated largely by cost-cutting reasons. -
Nicely done Mr. Angelini; however, I still think OCZ pulled a nasty car-salesman tactic on their newest 25 nm NAND SSD products, and as such will be looking elsewhere to purchase any future SSD. Blaming resellers or other sources for the SKU is an incompetent way of deflecting fault and has made them look even more silly.Reply
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cangelini Thanks radiovan. Like I mentioned in the story, we'll have to see if companies like Corsair and Patriot are able to get their upcoming renamed SKUs onto Newegg, Tigerdirect, Zipzoom, etc.Reply -
1.29 Firmware....how nice... pity that ocz only documents 1.28 for the moment.Reply
And then again why not update the 25nm to 1.29 too?
But I guess consistency is not always wished when trying to demonstrate something -
nebun binoyskiOk, but when will we be able to buy ssd's that are $100 @ 1TB capacity?in about 10 years or so....that's a very big maybeReply -
yose3 binoyskiOk, but when will we be able to buy ssd's that are $100 @ 1TB capacity?Reply
when you throw a shoes to bush again meaby lol
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Reynod It is all about profit.Reply
The real reason is that going to cheaper flash with a 3000 cycle life to reduce the total cost of production (and therefore increase profit) means ... increasing the amount of redundant memory to replace the flash that dies due to wear ... and that process means better error correction is required to achieve that ... therefore performance is effected.
Chris ... I got it into one sentence ... albeit a horrible one.
Nice article mate.