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 Reads

At low queue depths and small random reads, we see the Vertex 3 Pro suffer in IOPS.

The header of these two charts is the same, except for one important detail. The first employs a queue depth of one, and the second uses a queue depth of 32. Why are these figures important? Well, look what they do to performance.

Native Command Queuing, part of the SATA specification, was originally designed to improve the performance of mechanical disks by allowing the hard drive itself to optimize the order in which read and write commands get executed. Of course, the physics of a hard drive don’t apply to SSDs. However, the multi-channel architecture of a solid state drive enables it to similarly field multiple concurrent requests—though Intel claims the bottleneck isn’t the drive, but rather the host system itself. Today’s SSDs are consequently dependent on high queue depths in order to realize the specifications you see manufacturers quoting.

With a QD of one, the new Vertex improves on what we've already seen from SandForce, augmenting performance in situations unfavorable to the way modern SSDs run best: with lots of concurrent requests. Cranking queue depth up to the other (very unrealistic on the desktop, but much more plausible in the enterprise space) extreme of 32, the Vertex 3 Pro is suddenly pushing ~217 MB/s.

Once we move to larger random reads, we see OCZ's newest drive take the lead again.

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