SSD Flash Drive Reviews

OCZ Vertex 2 80GB Sandforce SF-1222 MLC SSD Drive Review

For the last 6 months I've run the OCZ Vertex 2 80GB Sandforce based SSD as my operating system / applications drive. Moving up from my Corsair X64 which I had to flash with Patriot firmware to get TRIM, this drive was a real treat. I finally had an SSD made by a company that had an easy firmware update process (my Corsair did not support doing a firmware update). However the entire time I ran it I had a nagging feeling something wasn't quite right under the hood, specifically when performing large write operations they seemed to take longer than expected.

It wasn't until I was reading on the NCIX customer support forms that I realized there were 2 difference OCZ Vertex 2 SSD generations of drives, the first build with 34nm NAND, and the second with 25nm. Unfortunately my drive used the newer generation 25nm which takes quite the performance hit from the 34nm models (Sequential write of 95MB/s vs 50MB/s)! To see the performance difference check out the OCZ Datasheets below:

• 25nm OCZ Vertex 2 Product Sheet
• 34nm OCZ Vertex 2 Product Sheet

OCZ Vertex 2 80GB Sandforce Features & Specifications:

• 60GB to 240GB SSD Drives available (Gen 1 34nm NAND: 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, Gen 2 25nm NAND: 80GB, 160GB, 200GB)
• SandForce 1222 Controller
• TRIM Support
• Seek Time: < .1ms
• Operating Temp: 0°C ~ 70°C
• Low Power Consumption: 2W in operation, .5W in idle
• Shock Resistant up to 1500G
• ECC Recovery: Up to 24 bytes correctable per 512-byte sector
• RAID Support (Garbage Collector)
• MTBF: 2.0 million hours
• 3-Year Warranty

OCZ Vertex 2 80GB Sandforce Benchmarks

Test Machine specs: ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 MB, Phenom X6 1090T 3.2Ghz, g.SKILL 1333Mhz 7-7-7-21 DDR3.

These ATTO benchmarks definitely show a lot of potential from this drive. The max write speed was 255.75MB/s, and the max read speed was 280.67MB/s!

Where did my speed go?? Well unfortunately for all your Vertex 2 34nm owners AS SSD gives a lot more realistic speed numbers and here we see a 39.69MB/s write speed, not even 40MB/s! My new Edge Boost Pro SSD has a max write of 133.49MB/s.

Despite my disappoint about having a slow drive the IO operations per second ratings aren't that bad at all compared to an Indilinx drive like the g.Skill Falcon.

Very similiar numbers to AS SSD, but slightly higher. Note that even with a 512K block of data the write speed is very low.

OCZ strongly recommends that you don't use HD Tach, and quite frankly I can't blame them after looking at this drive. I like HD Tach as it gives you a rough idea of the quality of the NAND used (my EDGE TECH Boost Pro didn't go below about 280MB/s and sustained 300.3MB/s for the average speed).

Conclusion:

Although this was a descent drive the 34nm version would have been noticable faster. That being said it was a great drive for 7 months, but I couldn't believe the speed difference when I upgraded to the Edge Tech Boost Pro SF-2281 SATA3 SSD drive. If you are in the market for a new drive I would skip this drive and get a newer SATA3 SF-2281 based drive even if you only have SATA2 ports. I will however definitely recommend OCZ drives in general for the easy of updating your SSD firmware, and for the frequency of the updates.