Performance Testing and Results
The following system was used to test this drive:
| CPU: | Intel Core i5 3570k |
| Motherboard: | Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi (review soon!) |
| RAM: | G.Skill RipjawsX 2133-7-10-7-1t |
| GPU: | EVGA GeForce GTX580 |
| HDD (boot): | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MaxIOPS |
| HDD (testing): | OCZ Vertex 4 128GB |
| PSU: | OCZ Fatal1ty 1KW |
| Case: | Thermaltake Armor Revo |
The ITX motherboard in a full tower case looks pretty hilarious, but this little motherboard has the fastest bootup sequence (from windows logo to usable desktop) of any board I’ve tested. It has excellent SATA performance! Naturally a SATA3 6Gbps port is being used for the Vertex 4. Look for a review on the motherboard soon.
The benchmarks were all first run on a completely empty drive, I then installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on the drive (as well as drivers) and ran all the tests again. For the second set of tests the Vertex 3 was removed from the system and I booted off the Vertex 4 being tested. The tests with the drive empty have pink borders, the tests with the drive full have blue borders.
On with the benchmarking!
ATTO, Stock Settings
We don’t quite hit the rated 430MB/s write and 560MB/s read, we’re fairly close though. What we do have is a write speed that ramps up extremely quickly, you can really see the cache at work here! Overall it managed to beat the very fast Vertex 3 MaxIOPS in write speeds. It’s initial ramp up even beats the RevoDrive 3 X2, but that drive caps out a bit higher (at 1.2GB/s…). I’m impressed, especially given the price of this drive!
Let’s try a deep queue next.
ATTO, Queue Depth 10
A higher queue depth will help drives that have a hard time utilizing all of their IOPS due to latency issues. Some drives (like the Revodrive3 series) really like a deep queue, others don’t care or dislike it.
The Vertex 4 runs a bit faster with a large queue depth in some bits and a bit slower in others, it really doesn’t care much either way overall.
CrystalDiskMark, 64bit
The CrystalDiskMark results look quite delicious, the 4k results aren’t the best we’ve seen but the 4k QueueDepth32 results are beaten (barely) only by the $600 RevoDrive 3 X2. I score that as a win! Especially considering that this drive is currently going for $115 or so.
AS SSD Benchmark
The only drive we’ve tested here at Funkykit that even comes close to these scores is the RevoDrive3 X2, again. This Vertex 4 128GB beats it, by a decent margin. It runs faster on average with more data on it, too. Some of the tests go down, some go up. The final score is higher though.
Normally at this point I would add PCMark05 storage test results. Unfortunately PCMark05 and this drive do not get along at all, the results come out 0.000MB/s. I’ve never seen it do this before, it’s a strange business. PCMark05 benchers, look elsewhere or wait for a patch.
