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: PCMark Vantage Storage Test

PCMark Vantage comes as close as we get to approximating real-world performance using a synthetic benchmark. The Application Loading metric measures disk drive performance while loading Microsoft Word 2007, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Internet Explorer 7, and Outlook 2007.

This is just the beginning of the trend, but notice that both disk drives fall to the back of the line. Even Western Digital's VelociRaptor can't keep pace.

While PCMark Vantage is the closest thing to showing real-world performance, it has its own flaws. When we were testing the Vertex 3 Pro, we discovered about a 5000 point variance in the final score (50 000-55 000 PCMarks). When we examined the scores of the individual tests, we noticed that the drive would either perform outstanding in Windows Defender or Application Loading, but never both. We have seen variances with PCMark in the past and this is well within those tolerances, but it is something we wanted to mention for those curious about our numbers.

Using >99% streaming reads, Vertex 3 Pro shows its dominance in the gaming throughput test, though it doesn't come anywhere near its rated specifications.

The video editing test is split more evenly between reads and writes. This time all three SandForce drives top the chart, though the Vertex 3 Pro still leads by a healthy margin.

A Windows Defender scan in Windows Vista shows a small improvement for the Vertex 3 Pro.

The Windows Media Center test runs SD video playback, SD video streaming to an extender, and records an SD video concurrently, yielding an even split between reads and writes. Here, we see OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro exceed the cap that would have been imposed by 3 Gb/s SATA, trouncing the other drives in this test.

Hot off of that victory, we're faced with a situation where the Vertex 3's read performance should allow it to shine in this predominantly read-based test. Instead, the X25-M leads the pack this time. We can only assume that the data involved in this metric is not handled well by specific versions of SandForce’s firmware.

The photo import test is also mostly read-based, so it isn't a surprise to see the newest SandForce drive lead the pack again considering how well it performed in CrystalMark.

OCZ tops the chart again. Remember that this is naturally almost all read-based.

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