OCZ Vertex 2 Pro (SandForce) SSD preview - Final Words & Conclusion

The Verdict

You know, the product that we have in our hands is an engineering sample. It's not finalized and neither we feel is the firmware finished. Now after checking Anand's results I expected better performance than what we have seen, we figured to at the very least reach over 270 Mb/sec in both read and write performance in most scenarios. This drive with our tests is as good as say an OCZ Vertex Turbo, and here and there it will really take off, for example in the PCMark tests and once we create certain conditions for it (AHCI + Matrix driver).

The product we had in our hands is not there yet in terms of final peak performance. Read perf will be announced at 270 MB/sec. We had a hard time reading even 230 MB/sec and after checking out a thing or two, we do believe that the numbers we are seeing are due to either the firmware, or some weird anomaly. We read out the SSD and noticed that this drive already had been in use for over 120 hours, likely fragmenting it. Regardless of that, the enabled TRIM (active in our Windows 7 session) should have some of that issue. After erasing the drive completely performance did improve a little, but not much.

But yes, we liked what we saw, but will have to retest the final product as we can not seem to reach peak advertised performance. A shame really, as we know the product can do it ! The most amazing thing to see is the random I/O performance of small files. Now again that performance is roughly the same as the latest generation Indilinx controller, but the astonishing thing is that the SandForce controller is managing it all by itself without the need for cache memory. There's a very dirty little secret hidden inside that SF1500 controller alright.

And that's where we are going to end this preview of the OCZ Vertex 2. We feel that the product will definitely get faster than the Indilinx series in the long run, but it does need a little brushing up in order to achieve that. But this little fellah has a lot of potential and we look forward to testing the finalized product real soon. Until then my money however will still be on an Indilinx based product.

Pricing should be roughly the same as the OCZ Vertex Turbo series, the release date will be roughly March 2010.

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