OCZ Vertex 4 SSD review with 1.5 firmware - SSD Performance File Copy and game tests

File copy write test  - CHOKE test on uncompressed files.

Any storage unit's nightmare, whether that is an HDD or SSD, is storing really small files as fast as possible. So on our Test PC we created a RAMDISK partition (we can't use an SSD/HDD here as it would be a bottleneck) in which we install roughly 500MB worth of text files, highly compressible. We now measure how many seconds it takes to copy the files from the RAMDISK towards the storage unit tested today.

The crucial factor here is that we copy many small files that can be compressed. But we made the files so small that the file-system will simply choke up. Make no mistake, this test is ridiculous. Over time results will build up of course.

So in the above chart we take 0.52 GB of random text files sized from just merely bytes (the vast majority) up-to 250KB. In total copy queues up over 113,586 files in this test, and these are being copied from the RAMDISK towards the storage unit in the number of minutes shown above. Lower is obviously better.

Now the bottleneck is the file-system and this test is bizarre (you basically drag a hundred-thirteen-thousand miniscule files and drop them onto the storage solution). The difference will be marginal, even compared to HDDs as NAND based flash solutions behave very similar as even the PC itself (chipset/cpu/memory) becomes a bottleneck. Being a memory cache based SSD, the vertex 4 performs surprisingly exceptionally really.

File copy write test  - Slightly larger compressed files.

For the second real world file-copy test we take compressed data, like small JPG and MP3 files. We have them in random sizes from less than one KB up-to slightly larger 2MB files to emulate MP3 copying better (which most of you can relate to a notch better).

So we know that once we pass 16/32KB sizes, SSDs really haul ass and speed up almost exponentially. Hence we increased the total workload here towards 3 GB with 4272 compressed files in total, with a maximum files-size of 2MB. We drop all these MP3/JPG files onto the drive, copied from the RAMDISK and measure the amount in seconds it takes for the storage unit to deal with it. Again, the files are being copied from the RAMDISK in the amount of seconds you see above towards the tested storage unit, lower is obviously better.

We already had an indication that sustained performance of compressed data should perform really well on the Indilinx Everest 2 products, and so it does.

Performance Game load times

Here at Guru3D.com the audience is catered to gamers. And as such I like to start off with three real world performance game tests for a change.
 

We take the Alien Versus Predator benchmark, place it on the storage unit being tested and run it. From the moment we click on the icon and load up the game to the moment the benchmark start to run is what we are looking at for load time in seconds.

We just added this test, so in the future results will build up with more and more storage units.