OCZ Vertex 3 SSD Series Thread

Hey guys. I've decided to go with the vertex 3. I just want to know the difference between the standard and Max IOPS edition. Any real world benchmarks or review or comparisons to demonstrate the difference?

Which one do you guys advise? I have a poll attached. If you vote, please explain why.

Thanks guys

Btw, it is for the 240gb OCZ Vertex 3

 

I vote neither... why have you picked the Vertex 3 in the first place (not sure if you had other posts about this)?

 

Well I'm not getting it right away, probably waiting until the fall for prices to drop. But mostly I didn't feel like paying a premium for intel, and have less performance, and have been warned by many to avoid crucial, so I chose the performance king. If not, I will wait for intel to release their new ssds, or see how the m4/c400 reviews in real world use

 

You can probably find 10x the people who say that you should avoid OCZ
I believe the 250GB 510 is like $50 more than Vertex 3 and M4 $50 cheaper

 

Sometimes, there is a reason for the premium you paid for Intel, in the name of testing and quality assurance. Buying a new Sandforce based drive in its initial stage is simply beta testing for them. Personally, I think I should get it for free to do this, if not getting paid for it.

 

There's plenty of reasons to avoid OCZ too, actually.

 

Maybe the second generation Sandforce controller is more reliable than the first. Until I have proof that it's not, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Fact is, the Vertex 3 is th fastest SSD available. I wouldn't get the MAXIO version unless you're running a server.

 

if you wait till fall, why not chose by then? new stuff will be around by then, new pricing, etc.

never chose about a hw component if not the moment you buy it.

oh, and no ocz, please

 

As much as OCZ has a negative rep, other Sandforce products do not seem to be more reliable.

Of course there is the 25nm NAND issue, but the Vertex 3 has 25nm NAND anyway.

Support and RMA procedures of OCZ are good in my experience.

 

it's the worst of two things: sandforce products in general are not that reliable. and ocz is not trustable. combine them, and you get the vertex. never forget the 'core', never forget it. at least i won't.

ocz is a company that doesn't care what they sell, as long as they can sell it and make money. even when they know the product has issues, that doesn't matter to them. they continue to sell them. so do others, but they're quite famous for it (not only, but partially due to the lots of anandtech articles back then).

anyways, no vertex. nothing sandforce and nothing ocz is a good filter. there's tons of great ssds that don't belong to any of those two.

 

I agree on the dubious practices of OCZ.

But if you want to buy the fastest SSD out there, you don't have other options. The Vertex 3 MAXIO is the fastest.

 

question is, do you want to accept all other issues just for claiming "fastest"? while this "fastest" is only measurable fastest, not noticeable?

hint: no.

and those, that do, they deserve it. that's like those who pimp their car to be even faster and all while the car can go beyond what's allowed in its default built anyways.

or the overclockers who claim they got now 1-2fps more due to some tweaking. yeah, as if you'd notice.

while talking fast: isn't there a sata3 ramdisk device out yet? full 600MB/s on everything including random readwrites would be awesome

 

You are asking me or yourself?

If it was my money I might take the gamble on the Vertex 3, assuming the price is right. The Sandforce 2 is quite a spectacular controller in my opinion. If rumor is right even Intel agrees on that.

 

it's a question everyone has to ask for himself, of course. but i normally never buy the fastest thing. i buy one of the fastest, which is within the range of no real gain of getting more.

and from those that are the options there, i chose the one i can trust most.

but yes, if i would have a lot of money, why not? to test and play with it, sure. but as i don't have much money, i want to buy stuff i can trust on.

 

I'm going to by OCZ from now on purely because notebookreview is so insanely bias against them lmao

If you want speed and that's all you're interested in... get OCZ. If you want to buy from the most wholesome company, go find some farm-raised no antibiotic SSD company.

 

haha. you fail, but you're cute at it. enjoy ocz


(hint, we're not against them for no reason. there's a huge history of ocz-failures and lies and cheats and customers that got not treated well. if you want to play with fire, enjoy it).

 

I won't be upgrading to SSD until my next computer most likely.

 

We? hehe I'm not against them!

 

you love the supsense, right? taking risks is fun

 

Yeah, if i was running a data center for a bank I wouldn't choose OCZ in my servers.

But I'm a computer enthusiast. Get a vertex 3 and bring out the popcorn

 

fridaynight event at phil: lets see the vertex die! what do we watch after that? a sandybridge sata2 port messing up a harddrive?

you like some wierd geekpr0nstuff, you!

but yeah, depends on the systems. at least on my laptop, i have to rely on. so there's a no go. and else, i try to get the best for the money, not the best overall.

 

??????????????

I was sitting in a chair with laptop thinking that I will find something interesting and new about fastest SSDs in OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS vs OCZ Vertex 3 thread. However suddenly I was click forwarded on some HATE vs LOVE OCZ/Sandforse. Is that a virus? Or forum error?
I am asking this because I was expecting to see some links on ssd's reviews or benchmark's screenshots here. I guess I am expecting too much from a life

 

for ssd reviews and benchmarks, check google.

for getting into details beyond that, listen to our gossip

 

It would seem so.

 

and it makes sense. for raw data, a search engine is faster, and has more information than anything else.

for human related data, experiences and that, a forum is best.

 

I would love to see some benchmarks on the Vertex 3 MAXIO.

There's a retailer here that has them in stock

 

then get one!

 

Agreed. Unfortunately there are no benchmarks available.

The only info on it is in the OCZ forum:
General Discussion Vertex 3 MAX IO partno - Page 5

 

I will make it easy for everyone.
Crucial M4: Marvell controller
Intel 510: Marvell controller
Vertex 3: Sandforce controller

 

Thank you. That is exactly I was talking about links. I read many interesting. This link is also little bit informative. http://www.ocztechnology.com/res/manuals/OCZ_Vertex3_MAX_IOPS_Product_sheet_1.pdf
looks like MAXIO has higher incompressible data speeds. Thanks to higher iops I guess.

 

Sandforce drives such as Vertex really suck in giving the speeds that they brag about too. Intel and Crucial does not. They are right where the specs say it should be.

OCZ official specifications for Vertex 3 240GB:
Max Read: up to 550MB/s
Max Write: up to 520MB/s

What the drive got from legitreviews:


Intel`s official specifications for Intel 510 250GB:
Max Read: up to 500 MB/s
Max Write: up to 315 MB/s

What the drive got from legitreviews:


Crucial`s official specifications for Crucial M4 256GB:
Max Read: up to 415MB/s
Max Write: up to 260MB/s

What the drive got from legitreviews:

 

Yeah but in link I provided there are 2 specifications of speeds: for compressible and non compressible data. Do not know what is written in data sheets of usual Vt3 though. Besides looking at benchmarks above I would choose OCZ.

 

I used the specificactions directly from their homepage. Vertex 3 does not have any announced speeds for compressed and non compressed. Not from what i can see.

Anyways benchmarks is only useful for people competing with scores. Real life tests is what matters and from what we have mentioned time after time, the differences between 510, M4 and Vertex 3 are neglible. And that even though Vertex 3 is much faster on benchmarks.

 

Oh i see. IOPS version do have different speeds on non compressible and compressible. Hm, will see if i can find any information about the normal Vertex 3 version. Must be there somewhere that too?

EDIT: Nope. Both the product page and the PDF spec sheet have only 1 speed for Vertex 3. If we use the same specs from the IOPS sheet the Vertex 3 scores 50 MB/s over specs. The two models act the same on non and compressible data right? Guess i was wrong then. Why don`t they include the same specs on the normal Vertex 3 version?

 

I guess the same reason why everyone is afraid to write random speeds instead of sequential.

 

OR they don`t want to show that the drive isn`t really as fast with incompressible data. It is the same for the IOPS version too. They have 500 and 500 MB/s if you look at their homepage under "specifications". You have click on the product sheet PDF file to see all details. Most people won`t bother.

Typical OCZ...

 

Wow I leave this alone for one night and it blows up like crazy.

Umm thanks guys. What is the most accurate "real-world" assessment available? Because even though the vertex 3 isn't living up to specs, it will outbeat everyone of those other ssds.

 

Crucial m4 256GB SSD (C400) Review - Introduction

 

It is very informative one if you take only schedules from there. I liked it. Also talking about that site I was feeling sick/going to barf looking at that marketing crap about c400. However at some points of time it was even funny to read how at this time they will write/show/remind/forget somewhere to tell/tell us that it is not even important that it sucks again comparing to Intel and OCZ and feel very happy when it finally performs Intel somewhere or even OCZ once or twice.
They even put between their c400 and a pair of competitors Intel + OCZ another pair of smth called SSDs to influence inconsiderate people!
I will NEVER gonna buy c400. Why? Because of this advertisement, that's why!

P.S. But thank you very much for the link.

 

Quick answer to your original question: from the 2 drives, pick the non-maxiops version. The other was designed for Servers where this matters, for all practical purposes IOPS > 20 000 is not going to result in ANY real world difference for your upcoming alienware (judging by your sig, this is what you're shopping for).

A quick google search seems to not show up any reviews of the new OCZ drive - you will probably have to wait a bit until there are some.

And finally - why you should not look at benchmark scores that much. I think we can all agree that the Vertex 3 is the king of benchmarks. And also, apart from sequential speeds, the Intel 510 is doing rather poorly.
Well, take a look at The Intel SSD 510 Review - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News . This review of the Intel drive paints the same grim picture of benchmark tests, until you look at page 6 and 7, the real word comparison ( anand's custom-designed test ). The Intel is now neck to neck (almost) with the Vertex 3, actually winning by a bit in Writes and losing by a slightly larger margin in the Reads.
What you should take from this is, that at some point higher benchmark scores mean absolutely 0 for real-world performance (and I mean zero!). You will get similar loading times in apps and games with any of the current drives, be they the vertex, intel or crucial. Note that any review of the SSDs that looks at realtime usage like app loading, windows installations and similar will paint the same picture.

With that out of the way, I hope you will see why so many people do not recommend the vertex 3. Yes, it's the fastest in benchmarks, but no, that doesn't mean your computer will run any faster that you can discern with it versus any other drive.

And hence people start looking at the other parameters like reliability and compatibility. Since none of the new drives have been out a long enough time to judge them based on their own merit, you can really only base your expectations of the previous generation. Where OCZ has bad reliability and customer relations reputation, Crucial had issues with bluescreens... and Intel had - well, nothing bad said about them.

So on the surface, you would think you're paying more for less by buying an Intel, but look a bit closer and you realize that's not actually the case. If you really care about posting screenshots of your high SSD benchmarks scores, by all means get the OCZ drive. But consider that you're paying for a product from a company that historically has had a (relative to competitors) bad record. Sure, the new Vertex 3s may be error free, and I sincerely hope they are - it's only better for us buyers to have faster reliable drives. But until it proves itself, I can't recommend it as the best choice (and I suspect most people who speak against OCZ think the same).

I hope this was useful for you . Best of luck in picking your drive.

 

^ Good post and I agree with everything you said, except this

Intel has had issues too. In the beginning of X25m they had huge firmware issues that they fixed later on. Now with Intel 510 there are big issues for Macbook Pros.

Sure Crucial has issues too but going by the hundreds of Newegg customer reviews Crucial C300 is doing a little bit better than Intel X25m. Samsung 470 does best.

Most reliable SSDs: Samsung, Crucial and Intel.
Least reliable SSDs: All SSDs that use first generation Sandforce controllers.

 

Fair enough, I stand corrected then. I did know about the macbooks, but that is probably to do with the fact that I think they switch to IDE from AHCI when starting any other OS (there are ways around this though) and god knows what else that is weird in the EFI setup they have, but yeah - it is indeed an issue. And as for the 1st gen Intels - i wasn't really following the SSD scene back then, my post was really mostly based on the last gen SSDs from the main contenders in the market and how you should really use that information to make an educated decision on this not-so-cheap purchase.

 

Killerbunny,

Very interested in this thread. I already have a couple of Vertex 3 240GB (one in the sig below, and another in a i7-2600K build). Just got them from Amazon a couple of weeks ago and now I'm waiting for benchmarks/reviews on the 240GB MAX IOPS version to see if it worth switching.

 

It would be an immense help and greatly appreciated if you could post some results from your vertex setup, that way we have a "real-world" example to put alongside the reviews. A lot of people have been downing vertex 3 lately, and I would like to see some of that reflected in user results before I even consider switching to another ssd.

 

First three attachments are from my Alienware in sig. For comparison, the following two attachments are from my desktop system (Asus Maximus IV Extreme/i7-2600K/Vertex 3 240GB)

I'm running RST 10.1.5.1001 on both systems. Don't know why the difference in performance.

 

Fixed

10char

 

From what I got it's better getting the max one for 120gb but for the 240gb it's not that much given the price difference.


I'm personally liking my vertex drive. But then again it comes down to price.

 

You've never heard of the chipset tweaks?
Look here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...-intel-series-4-5-965-chipsets-jjb-tweak.html

 

Was not aware of these particular tweaks. Thanks

 

OK guys. I am thinking to buy OCZ Solid 3 SSD 60 GB. I noticed that Vertex 3 has bigger iops level. I know thatthere is no big deal between for example 4k random read 55000 iops and 60000 iops. But how noticeable is difference between 10000 iops read and 16000?