Review: OCZ Solid Series SSD

I've removed my review for now. In hindsight my methodology was poor and I don't want to mislead anyone looking for an SSD with bad methods producing bad data and drawing incorrect conclusions.

I might re-write my full review or maybe not.

In the meantime, all I can say is that my solid series SSD seems to easily outperform the 5400rpm drive that it replaced. This is contrary to what I am told should be the case from a reviewer much much much smarter than I am: AnandTech. I need to understand why I am having a great user experience despite AnandTech's claims that it should be significantly worse than the slowest HDD tech available. It may be that AnandTech assumes a level of drive demand that exceeds how I use my system and so I am not experiencing these significant pauses in system performance (AKA stuttering). If that's the case, then I can still recommend the solid series for "normal" demand users and AnandTech's claims will only apply to heavier than average or enthusiast users. It may also be the case that after my drive becomes "used" (a large focus of the latest AnandTech SSD article) that the performance will become unacceptable compared to a 5400rpm HDD. If that occurs then there seems to be no solution and as AnandTech's latest article claims, "Those JMicron drives [are] nothing short of crap."

 

Nice review, glad to head it works well for you. Just like to say these jmicron drives are known to suck at small read/writes so the above result is not surprising.

Also, it looks like your 5400rpm drive is a really slow 5400, i wonder if a 7200rpm would give a dramatic increase in performance as well.

Finally, did you try to induce any stuttering. I think some people have tried running video and opening a ton of tabs in firefox to do this but i forget the exact method.

 

I don't know if I'd say that the drive "sucks" at small reads/writes - my testing indicates it is about the same as a 5400rpm drive. I don't think that means it *absolutely* sucks, just relative to faster SSDs. Also, as I mentioned in the quoted bit, if I were to have benchmarked the SSD with the power tweak so that it was operating at full potential it is most likely that the SSD would have outperformed the 5400rpm drive (and who knows - maybe even a 7200rpm drive). Anyway, overall in observed use (not benchmarks) it absolutely destroys my 5400rpm reference drive in all tasks so far.

Also, I've used many a 7200rpm drive and the performance is nowhere near as dramatic as this SSD.

In terms of trying to induce stuttering: I don't know what else I can do to try to make this SSD trip up. Last night I installed applications at the same time as browsing IE8 with several tabs open, synchronizing my personal folders via Windows Live Mesh, letting Windows Media Center index my media folders whilst playing music, and all the while while having several other applications running (Windows Live Mail, messenger, HostsMan, HostsServer, 3 sidebar gadgets). I observed no slowdown in behaviour at all - I was really amazed and wouldn't have even been disappointed to see stuttering since this is obviously a very unusual load and I won't replicate it until I install an OS and applications again.

 

Great Review. I also picked up Solid series 60gb this week and been working with it on my 3 year old XPS 1210 laptop. I am getting similar results on vista SP1 as you have posted. My writes are little lower than what you posted. I haven't really done a fresh install. I just cloned my old HDD using Acronis on to OCZ Solid. May be if I do fresh install I might get little better results. I have done some tweaks such as superfetch, prefetch, disabling indexing and defrag. I am really happy with this SSD. Something under $100 after rebate gives you a great price to performance. OCZ forum is really a great place to get the information.

For real life use I think it is certainly snappier than my old 5400rpm HDD. The most important feature of SSD for me is no hard disk noise. With laptop so close the hard disk noise has annoyed me ever since the first day I got this laptop. With SSD there is no disk noise and fan seems to come on less often.

 

Great read. I think I'll wait awhile for them to come down in price before I leap. But it's good to know that they're affordable and are slowly coming down in price.

*prays for 500GB SSD at affordable prices in 2010*