OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD Review

Rating: 9.5.

OCZ have been at the forefront of Solid State Technology now for some time, releasing a wide array of class leading drives to target every price point sector. Today we are looking at something very special however, the latest Vertex 4 drive, based around the new Indilinx Everest 2 Platform.

For the last year OCZ Technology have delivered a primary focus on Sandforce technology, however they have also been diverting resources to their own Indilinx platform. We recently reviewed the Octane 512GB drive which walked away with our ‘Worth Buying' award. The combination of balanced performance with both compressible and incompressible data was a heady combination for the enthusiast audience.

The recent Samsung and Marvell controllers however were very competitive, subsequently not allowing OCZ to dominate. Will this change today?

Sandforce have held the performance throne for some time now, although the range has been been tainted with controller problems. This was serious enough to cause a product recall for several of their partners and I personally feel that OCZ wanted to concentrate on their own products after this happened. After all it makes sense to have complete control over the product development … right to release, without relying on outside influences.

This leads us into the new Indilinx Everest 2 platform. OCZ have been determined to focus on small block performance, as well as reducing write amplification. They have a new controller to address these performance areas.

OCZ plan on maintaining support for the original Everest, while Everest 2 will be released to aggressively target the demanding enthusiast user. OCZ are releasing 128GB, 256GB and 512GB Vertex 3 drives priced at $179, $349 and $699 respectively. Today we are focusing on the flagship 512GB capacity.

Features:

• SATA 3.0 6Gb/s Interface
• Ndurance™ 2.0 Technology
• Reduced Write Amplification without Compression
• Advanced Multi-Level ECC
• Adaptive NAND Flash Management
• Redundant NAND Array™ (RNA) Technology
• Auto-Encryption and AES-256 Support
• Advanced ECC Engine (up to 128bits per 1KB)
• Superior Flexibility (extensive NAND compatibility; vendor-specific NAND commands)

The OCZ Vertex 4 ships in a dark grey and black box, dramatic and effectively designed. The capacity is listed bottom right on the front of the box.

OCZ include a quality 3.5 inch drive tray, mounting screws, literature on the product and a ‘MY SSD is faster than your HDD' sticker.

The Vertex 4 ships in a dark chassis, which is comprised of a plastic front and a metallic rear panel.

The chassis is opened by removing 4 screws from the rear. There is a cooling pad which connects directly with the Indilinx Controller.

The Indilinx controller is marked IDX400MOO-BC (Vertex 3 controller was IDX300M00-BC). OCZ are using Intel synchronous 25nm NAND flash memory (29F32B08JCME3). Each of these is 32GB capacity (8 x 32GB on both sides of the PCB) alongside 256MB of Micron DRAM.

Just before we started testing, OCZ updated the firmware (from '30' to '31') with last minute performance increases. Using their dedicated Toolbox software only takes a few seconds and the process is painfree.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:

CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives (used in Core i7 2700k system above):
Transcend SSD720 128GB
Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw)
Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

PCIe drives test system:

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB

Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 7
IOMeter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64.

4k QD32 performance is class leading, outperforming all other Solid State drives to date. This obviously excludes the Raid 0 Intel 520 Series configuration and the RevoDrive 3 x2.

Incredible results with incompressible data and a very promising first test.

We enabled the ‘compressible’ data mode, otherwise known as ’0×00′. I reran these tests many many times to confirm the results above. The OCZ Vertex 4 suffers no penalty back and forward between these data modes. This has not happened before, so it is remarkable.

Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in recent months.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The Vertex 4 scores 528 MB/s read and 461 MB/s write, placing it mid table, just behind the Patriot Pyro 120GB (Sandforce 2281 powered).

Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD deals only with incompressible data and the Vertex 4 512GB scores highly, right at the top of the chart again. The overall score of 1082 points is class leading.

Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The drive scores 5,282 points, within the top 10 percent of results in the last year.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write to measure performance. We use the same test, but for random read performance also.

IOMeter performance is exceptional in both read and write tests. Every manufacturer will test these drives slightly differently, but our results are very close to the OCZ claims. By comparison the OCZ Octane 512GB with fw 1.13 scored 28,041 IOPS in our 4k random read test.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

Exceptional performance, scoring 22 seconds – right at the top of the chart.

The Vertex 4 512GB claims the top spot in our performance chart, right behind the RAID 0 Intel 520 configuration and the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB.

We review many Solid State Drives on Kitguru every month and to be honest handling a deluge of SandForce 2281 powered drives can often be a tedious process. The results are generally so similar that it really does boil down to the specific manufacturer retail price.

OCZ's Vertex 4 512GB is a game changer and one of the most capable, well balanced Solid State drives on the market. I can't remember the last time I genuinely felt excited reviewing a Solid State drive, so it was a refreshing change putting the Vertex 4 through the paces today.

Sandforce have ruled the performance charts for a year or more now, even though their controllers have been at the center of reported, high profile failures. A portion of the enthusiast audience have subsequently lost faith in 2281 powered drives, turning instead to alternative Samsung and Marvell controllers. OCZ have also experienced reasonable success with their Indilinx Octane drives, however the update to the Indilinx controller today is significant.

OCZ have intended to improve small block performance, as well as reducing write amplification. They can, without question consider their Indilinx Everest 2 a total success.

IOPS performance is class leading, way ahead of Sandforce and other competitors. We recorded 84k and almost 88k in our 4k random read and write test, respectively. This is over twice the performance of the previous controller configured with the same test parameters.

Sequential, compressible performance is a little less than achievable with the leading Sandforce 2281 drives, however when factoring in compressible and incompressible data, the Indilinx Everest 2 IDX400MOO-BC controller is much stronger than anything else we have tested to date.

It is worth pointing out that there are performance variables between the 128GB, 256GB and 512GB Vertex 4 drives. All three are rated at 535MB/s read, but the 256GB and 128GB drives deliver inferior write performance of 380MB/s and 200 MB/s respectively. IOPS performance should be identical between drives, although we can't confirm that as we only have the 512GB drive at hand.

If you are in the market for a new, high performance drive which doesn't pay a performance penalty when dealing with incompressible data then the Vertex 4 should be the first choice. It is also going to be ideal for small block duties, such as heavy database environments.

The Vertex 4 512GB drive will cost $699, however we don't have confirmed UK pricing yet. We would however expect the price to be around the £550 inc vat mark.

EDIT: Price is confirmed at £559.99

Pros:

• equally good with compressible and incompressible data.
• IOPS performance is class leading.
• 5 years warranty.

Cons:

• None we can mention.

Kitguru says: The Vertex 4 is the first major update to the Solid State Market since the Sandforce 2281 controller was released.

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