
OCZ Vector 256GB SSD Review - justinbkerr
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/%5Bprimary-term%5D/ocz_vector_256gb_ssd_review
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dmix
For those curious about high-end SSD's. I took the bait and it really wasn't
worth it.

I paid $300 for a Vertex 3 when it first came out. It advertised 500MB/s up
and down with SATA6.

I upgraded from one that was around 150MB/s.

I'm a developer, on my computer all day and to be honest, I rarely noticed the
difference between the two.

The difference between HDD and SSD is massive. But between different SSD
tiers, it's not super noticeable unless you are a heavy writer/reader for
maybe something like video editting.

Kind of like 24bit music vs 16bit.

Spend the cash on size and reliability, not performance.

~~~
mbell
To be fair, if you only look at sequential access numbers on any disk your
likely to be disappointed unless you happen to have a very sequential
workload, which isn't terribly common.

Loading large applications, copying large files, loading the OS, some types of
video editing, etc may benefit from sequential performance but for the
majority of real world workflows 4k random I/O per second is a much better
metric (though certainly not universal). IO/sec is much more important in the
area of dev work, database performance in particular. The current generation
of SSDs are massively faster in IO/sec than older models, much greater
improvement than the sequential numbers indicate. That said, you still may not
notice a difference if what your doing doesn't hammers a database that is
'safe' (guaranteed consistency on disk) or if your working set doesn't
outstrip the ram you've allocated to the db.

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bcoates
Given the difference in reputation between OCZ and not-OCZ I couldn't imagine
buying them on anything other than a "way cheaper than everything else" basis.

Unremarkable benchmarks plus no cheaper than models that have been on the
market for some time? Double-pass.

~~~
sciurus
Are you saying OCZ has a bad reputation? I haven't followed things closely,
but I used a Vertex 2 and now use a Vertex 3 based on their good reviews at
<http://www.anandtech.com/tag/storage>

~~~
bcoates
Yeah, they're known for unreasonably high failure rates and terribly warranty
service.

SH/SC says "Do not buy drives from OCZ or last-generation (SATA300) models,
they are not reliable." and refers people to this list:
[http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-
returns-...](http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-
rates-7.html)

It's possible that they're the entire cause of the "SSDs are less reliable
than spinning disk" conventional wisdom.

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leeoniya
much better: <http://www.anandtech.com/show/6363/ocz-vector-review-256gb>

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jrajav
Do your research if you're planning to soup up a Macbook with an OCZ SSD.
Whichever party is to blame, they often don't play well together. Mine
randomly freezes for up to 30 seconds every couple of days. Others have
reported worse symptoms. By the time I get another SSD, I'll probably be
getting a new computer, but for anyone else thinking about it:

1) Don't buy OCZ, OR make sure it has a SATAII, not a SATAIII interface, (That
may apply to other brands if OS X is to blame; I'm not an expert on the issue)

2) Take out the optical drive and put it there.

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kondro
Given the massive increase in productivity any SSD provides over mechanical
drives ~$250 is more than worth the price if you don't already have an SSD.

~~~
highwind
I agree. I believe their performance increase far out-weighs their high
failure rate and high cost. Just make sure you have good back up.

~~~
fjorder
The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-
drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of
reasons for not using a SSD.

Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that
they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store
your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall
easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no
going back.

~~~
qq66
We've had 3 SSD failures out of 5 SSDs, and 0 magnetic failures out of 8
magnetic drives in our office over the last 2 years. We definitely keep only
OS, programs, and VMs on SSDs.

~~~
barrkel
I've had 3 failures out of 8 HDDs and 0 out of 2 SSDs (Intel X25M and Samsung
830) in the same period.

At this point I would recommend buying SSDs that have proven track records;
don't buy cheapest on the basis that any SSD is better than any HDD.

~~~
qq66
We bought all of them on reliability track record alone.

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hayksaakian
256gb is a bit overpriced at the moment for ssds, the sweet spot is a 128gb
drive for as close to 100$ as possible.

~~~
barrkel
However, a 128G boot drive for Windows is cramped without creative use of
junctions - I've been there with 80G X25M, it's worth paying over the odds for
the space.

Fiddling around too much with junctions can break some installers, for
example, that expect the MoveFile() API to work for directories whose paths
start with the same drive letter, or do weird things with NTFS hard links.

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malkia
In the comparison table, the Corsair Neutron GTX scores magnitudes lower IOPS
for 4kb writes 477 vs ~ > 10,000 - 17,000 for the rest of the drives.

Anyone can shed light on this? Can this benchmark be flawed somehow? (I myself
am trying to convince whether SSD is good or not).

~~~
wmf
There are a ton of corner cases that can produce weird results, so it's
possible that that result is correct (but probably not representative of real-
world performance). If you read a different review that uses a different
workload driver, it will probably produce different 4KB write numbers.

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jimmthang
I want one but that's still too expensive

~~~
hartror
How much is your time worth?

