OCZ Vector 512GB SSD Review

Late last year we took a look at the 256GB Vector drive from OCZ and it walked away with one of our highest ever scores. It may have been an expensive drive, but in regards to performance there really was nothing to touch it at the time. 8 months later and we have the larger 512GB version in for testing. How does it compare and is it still a tempting proposition in late 2013? Solid State Drive technology moves at a staggering pace and while Sandforce 2281 was a very popular controller to use a year ago many companies have shifted their focus elsewhere. Sandforce was at the center of many reliability issues so it made sense to make the move. OCZ subsequently invested a lot in their latest Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller and the results with both compressible and incompressible data has certainly been impressive. This is important as regular readers will be aware that Sandforce 2281 exhibited a weakness when dealing with incompressible data, due to the nature of the compression based algorithms at the heart of the design. OCZ say the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller is a ‘milestone’ for the company. Not surprisingly it is based around the SATA 3.0 6Gb/s interface with 25nm IMFT NAND flash onboard. The Vector drives are built into the super slim 7mm form factor, making them ideal for ultraportable laptop systems. OCZ have released three models: 128GB, 256GB and finally the 512GB we are looking at today. It is worth pointing out that the 128GB model of the Vector drive exhibits slightly lower performance when compared directly against the 256GB and 512GB drives. Sequential write performance is said to drop from 530 MB/s to 400 MB/s. Sequential read performance is the same – all Vector drives are rated at 550 MB/s. OCZ Vector overview: Sata 3.0GB/s interface 25nm IMFT NAND Flash 7mm form factor 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models. Bundled with cloning software High performance and endurance without compression/loss of usable capacity Advanced suite of flash management to increase durability and reliability. Lower power consumption (idle 0.9W/Active 2.25W) TRIM Support 5 year warranty (or 36.5TB writes – whichever comes first). The OCZ Vector arrives in a bright blue box with an image of the Solid State Drive highlighted in the middle. The capacity is listed bottom right. OCZ bundle a ‘I Love my SSD’ sticker, a 3.5 inch bay for installation in some desktop cases. There is also a code for Acronis True Image cloning software and a set of mounting screws. This software really is excellent and can completely mirror an internal mechanical drive for simple swap out, without losing any data. The Vector 2.5 inch Solid State Drive is only 7mm thick and will fit perfectly inside the smaller, current generation of super portable ultrabook laptops. You will notice the new design for the drive, the sticker covers the complete top of the drive, which is very attractive. Its not worth opening up one of these drives as you will void the warranty. We are here to do that for you. Kitguru fears no warranty claim! The new Indilinx controller ships with a thermal pad on top, which connects to the aluminum chassis. This cleverly acts as a passive heatsink, helping to reduce temperatures. The ‘IDX500M00-BC’ is the latest Barefoot 3 controller and surrounding it are eight 25nm IMFT NAND flash chips. Another eight of these memory chips are on the other side of the PCB. 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): OCZ Vertex 450 256GB Corsair Neutron 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB Visiontek Racer Series 120GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120GB Mushkin Chronos 240GB 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 MAX IOPS 240GB ADATA S511 240GB Corsair F100 100GB Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCMark 7 system: CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V LX RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper-X 10th Anniversary SSD: 120GB Kingston V300 HDD: 1TB SATA III 6Gb/s GPU: 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660Ti ODD: 24x DVD-RW PSU: Corsair TX650V2 Cooler: Corsair H40 + Arctic MX4 Paste Case: Zalman Z11 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. CrystalDiskmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64. Performance results are right at the top of the chart, behind the RAID 0 configurations and the high end RevoDrive. The 512GB Vector slightly outperforms the 256GB version which we reviewed late last year. When we switch to the compressible enabled 0×00 test - the performance of the drive holds well, showing very balanced results in both modes. Just what a performance geek wants to see. 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 512GB Vector performs exceptionally well in this test, right below the Hybrid and RAID 0 drives at the top of the chart. The results are marginally better than the 256GB Vector. 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. These results have knocked the OCZ Vertex 4 off the top slot, and nothing else has matched the performance of the 256GB Vector since we reviewed it. The 512GB Vector scores a little higher, taking top spot in the graph behind the Hybrid RevoDrive and RAID 0 Intel 520 drives. 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 512GB Vector scores 5,405 points, a little higher than the 5,395 points attained from the 256GB Vector. 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. IOPS performance from the Vector drives is exceptionally good and some of the highest we have achieved from a single drive. Both 256GB and 512GB are very closely matched. 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. The drive scores 22 seconds in our boot up test, with the fastest single drives on the market. The Vector 512GB takes joint top spot with the Vector 256GB model. Class leading results. The OCZ Vector 512GB drive is the fastest Solid State Drive on the market today, taking top spot from the previous leader, the OCZ Vector 256GB Drive. There is no doubt that the Indilinx platform is right at the top of the performance chart. As we said before there is no shortage of options now if you want a fast, affordable Solid State Drive. There are literally hundreds of Sandforce 2281 powered drives which basically have a different company sticker on them. These are generally very fast drives however when dealing with incompressible data they can take a large performance hit. Additionally there have been some firmware issues in the past leading to dead and disappearing drives, so we would advise some caution if you are buying a Sandforce 2281 drive today, especially on the second hand market. The latest Indilinx Barefoot 3 is truly an exceptional controller and the Vector drive is a worthy successor to the Vertex family. The excellent Vertex 4 was comfortably outperformed in our tests, which is a noteworthy achievement. The Vector 512GB also produces fantastic IOPS performance, ahead of the previous generation of drives and equalling the 256GB unit we had in for review months ago. We recorded between 90,000 and 100,000 IOPS in our random 4k tests, meaning this drive would be ideal for a myriad of intensive demands, not just simple boot duties. The only downside with buying one of these drives in the pricing, which is higher than many others today. The best price we found was via AMAZON UK - they are selling the Vector 512GB for £404.99 inc vat. After formatting in a Windows operating system there will be 476 GB of free space. This works out at 85 pence per usable gigabyte. 24 months ago this would have been phenomenal for a budget SSD, never mind a flagship product. This market is quickly becoming very competitive indeed. Pros: Class leading performance. IOPS powerhouse. great with incompressible and compressible data. Cons: It is a premium performance SSD and therefore quite expensive. Kitguru says: If you want the ultimate performance, then get one of these. Or two in Raid 0!