Review-comparison of SSD drives with a volume of 240-256 GB

Seven from the OCZ chest. Review-comparison of SSD drives with a volume of 240-256 GB
– Today will will take a look at the Specs, Hashrate, CPU performance and also a testing of this SSD Drive. We will go into more details as it regards to the testing in the article below.What’s the bottom line? The OCZ Vector assortment is definitely a top-end drive, the Agility 4 is the most affordable (in theory). With the rest, not everything is so obvious. The strange Octane on the first Everest, the outdated Vertex 3 and its modifications Max IOPS, Agility 3, Agility 3 20nm, and the Vertex Plus with SATA II are still on sale. Differences in their prices are often covered by differences in stores. It would not hurt even more cleaning of the rows and either a complete transition to our own Indilinx, or a clearer differentiation of models according to their purpose.

Introduction

A lot of time has passed since the release of that review. The OCZ company tried to put things in order and “clean the ranks”, on the official website of the company, many models received the “EOL” (“discontinued”) status, the range of user drives acquired a very modest look:

But … the market situation itself has not changed much and the range of OCZ solutions available for sale is still quite large. Not just “one store for the whole city and only on order”, but a full-fledged presence “came, saw, bought”. As a result, both buyers are lost with such a variety, and the manufacturer is badly: old models “interfere” with the sale of new ones. Both the drivers and the firmware of the drives themselves have been updated. The overall performance and behavioral alignment may change.

For this review, we selected several of the most common drives on sale and, moreover, approximately the same size “quarter terabyte” – 256 GB. It turned out eight models presented for testing by our reliable partner – Regard company: from the very ancient Vertex 2 to the new Vector and Vertex 450.

However, while working on the material, two remarkable events happened: firstly, OCZ Vertex 2 suddenly disappeared from the assortment of stores, and secondly, the sample of this model taken for tests safely refused right at the very beginning of testing – on the CrystalDiskMark test. The drive disappeared from the system, and after a reboot it began to be defined as unallocated and any attempts to create a file system on it ended in failure:

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In memory of him, only a screenshot of the CrystalDiskInfo diagnostic program remains:

And photos:

OCZ Vertex 2 models have always been famous for their unreliability – the statistics of their mortality were very high, and the copy I came across decided to once again confirm the bad reputation of this disc. Well, so much the easier.

This leaves only seven OCZ drives. What is the difference between them under the same testing conditions? What will the user get by choosing this or that model? The answers to these questions are worth finding out. So, the participants in the new review were:

Prices are quoted at the time of this writing.

Let’s take a closer look at the test subjects.

Test participants

OCZ Vertex Plus R2 240 Гбайт (VTXPLR2-25SAT2-240G)

The youngest among the drives in question and also the cheapest.

This is the weakest participant in the consolidated review, and no wonder:

As a controller for NAND memory chips, a rather weak by modern standards Indilinx Barefoot 2, released about a year ago and already initially focused on the budget segment, is used. It is based on a single-core ARM Cortex-M0 processor with a frequency of 165 MHz. Accordingly, there is no question of high performance. Only SATA II is supported (of course, you can also connect to SATA 6 Gb / s).

The memory is MLC NAND, made according to the 25 nm process technology and operating in asynchronous mode.

OCZ Agility 4 256 GB (AGT4-25SAT3-256G)

OCZ uses three types of packaging for its drives: a plastic blister and two cardboard packaging options. The first is used for budget models, the second – for solutions in the middle and high price segments. The Agility 4 disc is aimed at the budget sector, and therefore comes in a plastic blister.

There is no equipment available.

It is based on the eight-channel Indilinx Everest 2 controller, based on the developments and design of Marvell (in particular, the same dual-core ARM Cortex processor), but featuring an increased frequency of ARM cores (from 275 MHz to 400 MHz), as well as a number of other hardware modifications; it also uses the original firmware created by the engineers of the Indilinx company acquired by OCZ some time ago.

In principle, OCZ draws the attention of users to proprietary Ndurance 2.0 technology: the use of ECC correction for occurring data read errors, adaptive algorithms that control internal stresses during data write and read operations to compensate for cell wear, duplicate checksums, as well as caching and data prefetching. … However, all of this is present in the original Marvell controllers. The speed of read and write operations does not depend on the type of data with which it is being worked – this controller, like Marvell controllers, does not try to compress data like SandForce or simplify write operations like Phison controllers. Therefore, its speed does not depend on the type of data being processed.

It should be noted that, nevertheless, Everest 2 has a number of distinctive features: this eight-channel controller can operate with NAND-memory chips with sixteen-fold interleaving, which further increases its performance, can address up to 1 TB of capacity, in addition to this, it was laid down at the development stage support for MLC NAND class 10 nm, which eventually came to market much later than the controller’s release. And although it was replaced at the end of last year by the Indilinx Barefoot 3, Everest 2 is still an actual modern and high-speed controller.

The flash memory is 25 nm MLC NAND manufactured by Micron with an asynchronous interface.

OCZ Vertex 3 2.0 240 GB (VTX3-25SAT3-240G.20)

Reincarnation of the older Vertex 3 model, from which the second version differs in MLC NAND, made according to a more subtle technical process.

This is why this drive is relevant – it uses a fairly modern memory made by IMFT according to the 20 nm process technology (hence the “2.0” in the model name), while the original was based on 25 nm MLC NAND developed and manufactured by Micron.

The used LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller has also been slightly updated and received a new revision. Yes, yes, this drive is powered by SF-2281 – OCZ had a period when the original Barefoot and Everest were already outdated and not up to date, and Everest 2 was not ready yet. This forced the company to start using third-party controllers and the choice fell on the development of LSI. According to the installed controller, the final speed characteristics strongly depend on the type of data with which operations are performed – on easily compressed data, the speeds are higher.

This drive is still being produced, on the OCZ website it is positioned for the mainstream segment, in other words – a mid-range model.