KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
OCZ have been at the forefront of Solid State Technology now for years, and today we look at their new Vector 150 drive. The Vector 150 is built on the latest 19nm process geometry NAND to deliver the best performance with both compressible and incompressible data. OCZ are focusing now on the endurance of the new Indilinx drive which is rated for an industry leading 50GB a day of host writes for 5 years. Shipped in a slim 7mm housing it will also fit inside the latest super slim ultraportable laptops.
The Vector 150 will ship in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. All of these SATA 6Gb/s drives use the Indilinx BareFoot 3 controller and utilise the latest 19nm Multi Level Cell MLC Flash. Today we are looking at the 240GB version.
The Vector 150 drives are targeting the high end enthusiast user and are bundled with a 3.5 inch desktop adapter with Acronis True Image cloning software – meaning you can back up your current boot drive and just swap them over without a hassle.
All of the drives are rated to deliver 550 MB/s sequential read, although sequential write performance improves with the 240GB and 480 GB model, increasing from 450 MB/s on the 120GB model to 530 MB/s on the 240GB and 480 GB models.
IOPS performance also gets better with the larger capacity drives, and the 240GB model is rated at 90,000 IOPS random 4K read, and 95,000 IOPS random 4K write. If accurate, these are mighty impressive numbers – indicating ideal positioning for a database driven workstation environment.
[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgftzw8olh4′]
The Vector 150 240GB Solid State Drive ships in an attractive little box which highlights an image of the product along the top, and the drive capacity along the bottom.
Inside the box is a 3.5 inch desktop adapter, mounting screws, sticker and a little leaflet containing a link and serial number to download and activate a copy of Acronis True Image. This means you can easily back up your current drive and simply replace with the new OCZ Vector 150.
The Vector 150 Solid State drive ships in a well built little aluminum chassis which weighs 115g and measures 99.7 (L) x 69.75 (W) x 7 mm (H). It is encased in an ultra slim 7mm casing which makes it ideal for the thinner ultraportable laptop systems available on the market today.
The Indilinx BareFoot 3 (M00) controller is covered with a small thermal pad, using the aluminum chassis as a cooling device. OCZ are using the latest Toshiba 19nm Multi level Cell (MLC) flash. We have tested this NAND in the past and it performs exceptionally well with both compressible and incompressible data streams. The drive offers 256-bit AES compliant data encryption. It is dynamically over-provisioned to increase endurance and sustained performance over time.
OCZ are keen to point out that the drive endurance is rated at a 150% improvement over previous models. Write endurance is increased from 20 GB Day to 50 GB day of host writes for 5 years until typical client workloads.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:
Kitguru Test Rig 2
Compare 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
Other Drives
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Visiontek Racer Series 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update)
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
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 8
IOMeter
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 very strong, averaging between 340 MB/s and 360 MB/s in the read and write tests. This is a very strong drive if you deal regularly with incompressible data.
Equally strong performance with compressible enabled 0x00 data. A well rounded set of scores so far.
Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year.
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 drive scores well in ATTO, near the top of the chart, just behind the Vector 512GB drive.
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 only deals with incompressible data and this shows the strength of this drive, it can handle all forms of data extremely well.
Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
PCMark 8 is the latest version in our popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs.
We have only used PCMark 8 in a couple of SSD reviews, so we can't present many comparisons yet.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 test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.
Every manufacturer rates IOPS performance in a slightly different way. Using our own testing methodology we can see that IOPS performance is very impressive and one of the highest rated scores from a single SSD drive this year.
Simply put, the OCZ Vector 150 240GB is one of the highest performance Solid State Drives we have ever tested.
The Indilinx BareFoot 3 controller when combined with the Toshiba 19nm Multi level Cell (MLC) NAND combines to give exceptionally strong results with both incompressible and compressible data. In the real world, this means the drive is very responsive under all situations.
This Vector 150 240GB is equally capable in delivering lightning quick load times with programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Cinema 4D and can also deliver great speeds when dealing with encrypted data, multimedia files and compressed ZIP files.
IOPS performance is exceptionally good, landing in the top 5% of drives we have tested in the last year. This means the drive is an ideal partner for database driven situations in a workstation or server environment.
Pricing has yet to be confirmed, but this is a performance oriented drive in the OCZ lineup, so will priced accordingly. If you need the best all round data transfer possible however this should be certainly shortlisted.
According to OCZ the price of the Vector 150 240GB should be around the £190 inc vat mark. You can get updated pricing information from this page on Ebuyer.
Pros:
- Excellent all round performance.
- drive endurance is rated at a 150% improvement
- IOPS performance is strong.
Cons:
- Will be priced at the higher end of the scale.
Kitguru says: OCZ have released another exceptionally high performance drive for the demanding enthusiast user.
