OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro: Second-Gen SandForce Perf Preview

Features
By Andrew Ku
published

Intel's X25-M revolutionized the SSD market. But then SandForce turned it upside down, coming out of nowhere to establish a dominant position. Today we see the company preview its second-generation controller, unleashed over a native 6 Gb/s interface.

Benchmark Results: 4 KB And 512 KB Random Writes

SandForce's second-generation controller helps OCZ skip to the front of the line. OCZ said 70 000 IOPs in 4 KB random writes, and we got 70 000. It's hard not to be impressed by this chart.

Both the Vertex 2 and Agility 2 use the SF-1200. The difference between them is that the Agility 2 uses SandForce's mass production firmware. The Vertex 2 drive, in comparison, uses OCZ's optimized "extended" firmware. 

Writing completely random data to these drives represents a worst-case scenario for the first generation of SandForce drives. When we rerun our benchmarks, the values widely differ from run to run, despite performing a secure erase. This isn't the case with the Vertex 3 Pro. We are seeing fairly consistent scores across the board, and when we look at largely concurrent operations, the drive excels. With a queue depth of 32, it achieves roughly 300% speed increase from what we saw with the Vertex 2.

Andrew Ku
35 Comments Comment from the forums
  • karma831
    Performance looks great but I don't think the price will be.
    Reply
  • Bigmac80
    This is why i haven't bought a SSD yet. One it's freakin expensive 2 not enough capacity 3 it's freakin expensive! It'll go down next year when the world ends in 2012.
    Reply
  • falchard
    Price is lower then last generation. A shrink in die size means cheaper manufacturing costs, lower power usage, and better performance. Thats what happens when every hardware company shrinks their chips.
    Considering this is going to have the same amount of space, its going to be a cheaper SSD.
    Reply
  • Scanlia
    500MB/s... wow
    Reply
  • aaron88_7
    These are for enterprise use, that's why they are priced so high. They have features average consumers don't need. In other words, you're wasting your money if you are putting these into your home computer.
    Reply
  • dragonsqrrl
    OCZ Vertex 3 Pro MSRP Pricing:
    100GB: $525, $5.35 per GB
    200GB: $775, $3.88 per GB
    400GB: $1350, $3.38 per GB

    Getting cheaper, but still far outside my price range given their relative capacities. Even taking their amazing performance into account, it's still going to be a difficult sell for all but the most passionate enthusiasts, pros with heavy server workloads, or hardcore idiots. You're definitely not going to be getting your moneys worth putting one of these into your gaming rig. Enterprise type applications experience the largest benefits from these types of drives, and it's probably the only application where the performance benefits balance out the higher costs.
    Reply
  • JohnnyLucky
    The article made it perfectly clear the drive is not a drive that will be offered to consumers, gamers, and pc enthusiasts. How is OCZ going to reduce prices for consumer drives? Reduce features? Cut corners? Replace high quality components with lesser quality components? On answer is OCZ will reduc features. I'd like to know what else OCZ is going to do.
    Reply
  • Please add a TrueCrypt benchmark to your SSD evaluations, for two reasons. First, the difficulty of truly erasing data on a flash drive makes data security more important. Second, there are drives (like Sandforce) that use compression and may behave differently when storing encrypted (high entropy) data.
    Reply
  • nikorr
    About time
    Reply
  • Miharu
    Presently Plextor M2-M2S offer 370-420MB/s read for what... (64gb)150$-(128gb)250$. Vextor 3 price is out of the loop, it's too expensive. At this price I can buy 2 Plextor and put them in RAID 0.
    Reply