OCZ Nocti mSATA 120GB Unboxing + Benchmarks

Hey everyone,
I've been lurking around this forum for awhile now and it's helped me a lot, so I'm posting this review in the hopes that I can help the community out in turn. Thanks all!

System: Lenovo Thinkpad x220, Core i5-2540m, 6GB & 8GB DDR3-1333 RAM, Hitachi 7200rpm HDD.
I received the OCZ Nocti mSATA 120GB about a week ago from Amazon, and it came in a plastic case in a shrink-wrapped brown box in an Amazon box with a bunch of packing paper, accompanied with a sticker. A nice touch, but perhaps a bit excessive...









The physical installation was a breeze, but the software side of things was a bit more complicated. I first ran a few benchmarks on the SSD as a secondary drive (6GB RAM):

ATTO


CrystalDiskMark (Random Data)


3DMark Vantage


Then I used Acronis to restore a previous image I had, made when I had finished configuring the system fresh out of the box roughly 5 months ago. It worked like a charm, and bootup times/application load times were very, very fast compared to my old 7200rpm Hitachi HDD. I then installed Daemon Tools Lite, which gave me BSODs on boot (Startup Repair fixed them; I suspect it was the sptd.sys service). My next problem was when I tried to use Acronis to back up my SSD to my external hard drive – Windows 7 would BSOD a short time into the backup and upon reboot, there would be a message like "missing operation system" and the red LED light on the SSD would be lit. The only fix was to do a hard-shutdown and then turn it back on. I just kept trying to troubleshoot it, and one day the backups just started working again – still have no idea what fixed it.

Oh, and I also got another 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM at the same time, so I'll also post some comparisons between 6GB (my old setup) and 8GB performance.

Benchmarks with SSD as primary drive:
3DMark Vantage 6GB RAM


3DMark Vantage 8GB RAM


ATTO 8GB RAM


CrystalDiskMark 8GB RAM (Random Data)


WEI 6GB RAM


WEI 8GB RAM


Overall, I'm happy with the OCZ Nocti – it's faster than the MyDigitalSSD equivalent in 4KB and 4KB QD32 reads/writes and such a noticeable improvement over my old HDD. The only side effect that I have yet to troubleshoot is power consumption, which nearly doubled (~7W to ~13W idle) after installation. I'll inform you guys if I have any updates on this issue.

Thanks for reading!

 

Thank you for the review. Is there any chance you can do a fresh Win7 install and redo the CrystalDiskMark benchmarks? Your sequential read/write benchmark results are quite a bit slower than SF12xx based Renice X3 mSATA SSD as shown at http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...sata-1-8-sata-ssds-available.html#post6978065 .

 

I'm not sure, since I don't have a Win7 install disk available...I believe others are reporting the same or worse benchmark results at !!Pictures!! OCZ Nocti 120GB mSATA SSD mini-review - Lenovo Community and . In addition, because I didn't want to stress the SSD, I opted for 100MB rather than 1000MB in the CrystalDiskMark settings, no idea if that would make a difference.

 

Yeah.. I see others are reporting abysmal results too so no point in reinstalling Win7. We see the pricepoint is good, IOPS slightly better than the MyDigitalSSD but seq read/writes are slower. So if can find a Intel 310 at a good price then it's certainly the better performer.

 

sivikchen,

Thanks for posting the benchmarks. It's too bad that this drive is slower than what they are advertising. I was thinking about getting one of these for my X220T...but I guess I'll wait now. Maybe OCZ needs to update the firmware or something...

Below are my benchmark for my current Intel 80 GB G2 drive, SSDSA2M080G2GC:

 

just a link to some more Nocti 120 gb benchmarks on the OCZ forum

Poor-performance-from-Nocti-120GB

 

Are people finally waking up to the fact that OCZ + SF's lying, manipulating ways are all fluff and no substance?

I hope 2012 comes with SF and OCZ out of the SSD picture.

'You're using the wrong benchmark, you're using the wrong M/B, you're using the wrong criteria...'

No... simply using the wrong SSD and/or SSD Controller.

Return/give back the garbage from where you got it folks.

 

It's understandable that OCZ only wants to use "certain" type of benchmark that makes their drive seem competitive or better than the competition. Can't really blame them for that.

But luckily, we have this community and others to share information. So no more fooling us....

 

lol. That's not the only current beef with OCZ. At least in the bait and switch 34nm/25nm NAND flash issue, they offered RMA for anyone with the 25nm NAND chips. But the most recent issue has probably gotten way out of their hands. I do hope OCZ uses Indillix for something useful, and reinvigorates their entire lineup with them. So far, I have only seen people who will no longer use OCZ after buying a Vertex 3. Some were already burned with their RAM swap fiasco a long while back.

 

I wonder if it has to do with the smaller NM flash chips vs. the Renice we have seen. Also there are only 4 flash chips on an mSATA Drive making it so there are only 4 active channels while 2.5" can use from 8 to 16 controller channels. The compounding of these constraints are probably bogging it down a lot.

 

After 1.5 weeks of ownership, no problems yet. I'm actually satisfied with the Nocti's speed because it's faster than the (updated firmware) MyDigitalSSD by 1.5-2.5x in random read/writes, both in 4k and 4k QD32, which is what really matters for an OS/apps drive. I'm not willing to spend ~$90 more for the Renice or ~$135 more for the Runcore, and I need the 120gb of space for space-hogging steam games and flight sims. Also, you'd pay $0.50 more/GB for the Intel 310 80gb. I think for the price point of ~$225, it's a fair deal, and it fits my needs perfectly.

So why exactly are people hating so much on the Nocti considering its price point?