Three days spent with an OCZ Core V2 SSD (pics inside)

[OrphanBoy]

I've been hearing about how awesome SSD drives are for many months now - how once you go SSD, you'll never go back.
Last week at work we decided that in order to meet the demands of some software we were writing that we needed to remove seek times from the equation, and to cut a long story short we ordered an SSD drive but I pinched it over the weekend! Seems like a good time to see if these drives are as good as people make them out to be.

First up: I did minimal benchmarking here. I'm interested in subjectively testing the drive rather than seeing if numbers are bigger than other numbers. If I can feel that it's faster, then it's worth the money. Else it's £150 that could have been spent elsewhere.

Drive ordered: one 2.5" 60GB OCZ Core V2 SATA drive. Boss ordered it, so dunno if it's from OcUK or not...

Anyway it comes in some nice packaging:

It's really light to hold and the casing feels quite hollow, especially if you tap it with your knuckle The packaging quotes read/write speeds of up to 170/98 MB/s and 0.2ms seek times, RAID support and a mini-USB port. No CD or documentation included. There's no newer firmware available from the OCZ site either.


The drive came pre-formated and testing at work (spec in sig) with ATTO via USB connection didn't give stellar performance. Transfer speeds with small block sizes (sub 4MB) were poor and even at peak the drive never read greater than 40MB/s nor wrote over 30MB/s. Could be just a limitation of the USB interface, though.

Once home I downloaded the Win7 x64 RC build and installed it to the drive in my laptop, replacing the existing 200GB Seagate Momentus (7200rpm) and Vista 32 combo I had installed.



Installation was quick-ish taking about 15 minutes, although not lightning-quick (what with the installation coming off DVD). Same kind of time required to install the beta on my regular machine. I followed the "using and SSD with Vista" instructions on the OCZ forum stickies, such as disabling Superfetch etc. Page file was turned off.
Anyway, once set-up, I ran ATTO again and far higher transfer rates were reported - above 70MB/s in many cases with the write speeds suitably improved. Small sizes were still poor performers though.

I did plan on doing more usage tests over the last three days...but I had a trip to A&E as it was suspected that I had appendicitis so I didn't get to do as much as I'd liked. Anyway,

General usage
It's snappy, and there's not a lot of waiting involved. Copying files around still takes time (contrary to what I'd imagined) and having many concurrent reads/writes going on to the drive at once still incurr waits. Installing Windows updates/drivers etc (once downloaded) still take similar amounts of time.

Boot/shutdown times
It was a fresh copy of Windows so start and shutdown times were fast. Once past the BIOS I was at the desktop within twenty seconds, not two like I'd expected.

Program startup times
Fast, but hardly instantaneous. Opera started much faster than normal, but programs like Eclipse still take similar amounts of time to start. Eventually I found that it's not really noticable that startup times had improved - I kept loading a dozen programs at the same times just to remind myself that I had an SSD drive inside.

Gears of War
Still takes AAAAAAAAAAGES to install. Once the game's installed startup times are fast, but still hardly instantaneous. Level load times are again fast, but hardly mega. Gameplay was pretty stutter-free though (despite what my poor 8400 GS thought).

"Real work"
I'm a games programmer by profession so that's what I'd spend eight hours a day doing. That normally involves thousands of small files getting compiled into thousands of of object files then linked all at once into one big executable. Normally the IDE that gets used indexes the source files to give you tools like code-completion. This is where I was expecting the benefit to appear due to the excessive amount of seeking. I've seen huge benefits in link times (like a factor of ten) by moving all object files and the final executable to a RAM drive so would expect similar things from an SSD. Not so, though

As I said, faux-appendix failure got the better of me and I've got to give the drive back else I would have done more testing.

To conclude
Fresh copies of Windows always feel like this, and it's hard to tell where the improvement was coming from - having a fancy drive or a clean Windows copy. The real test for an SSD would be to take an existing install of Windows and image it directly onto the new drive to test Windows with a couple of months/years of funk.
I think people and review sites are making out SSD drives as a silver bullet which will transform your computing experience - I had always imagined that load times would all but disappear when seek times are elliminated, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Only in a few cases could I tell that an operation was faster than the equivalent on a hard disk - and I don't think that's worth the price premium. Bit of a placebo situation going on.

Would I spent £150 on 60GB? No, and I'm gonna go back to my 640GB RAID-0 set up (2x320GB Seagate 7200.10s) in my main machine. In general use it feels exactly the same yet I've got ten times more storage for less money! SSD drives do not perform like RAM drives.
The only pros for this drive are a) it has no moving parts, and I felt much more comfortable throwing my laptop around more / sitting at funny angles b) it's silent - I never realised how much I could hear my laptop drive c) I think the battery life was better...but like the rest of the SSD experience I think this could be a placebo effect.

Has anyone else been disappointed by SSD drives?

 

[user1453]

could the issues be due to a jmicron controller, I have read that these controllers which have small caches have problems with the small file IO that are required when used as an OS drive

 

[JonJ678]

The core V2 isn't so hot at many small files as it has no cache.

Where it really shines is in combination with a ram disk, placing anything that features large numbers of little writes into the ramdisk and running the rest from the ssd. The end result is very very quick.

I eventually moved from one of these to a vertex, and it no longer matters if I set up the ram disk or not, as it's very fast either way. If I do, the system is marginally quicker but nothing like the increase I saw with the core v2.

You've still bought a very good drive, it just takes slightly more setting up

 

[Ninja Please!]

Yeah that's totally not the right drive to base any general ssd opinion. And why on earth did you think windows would only take 2 seconds to boot? Have you not read up anything about them? And I'm far from a fresh windows install but my programs do open up instantly, and games open instantanly and load in seconds (<10). I'm sure your laptop was limiting you somehow as well. Should you have gotten an ssd that did not have a jmicron controller your experience may have been different.

To answer you last question actually plenty of early adopters of ssd's (which were using jmicron controllers) were disappointed with them.

It's not completely about access times also which a lot of people say it is. It's good read/write speeds combined with <1ms access times that made people rave over their ssd. Not only does it access large apps/programs fast but even when they are large that's where it's nice to have the 250mb/s throughput. To suggest experienced PC people are just having a "placebo effect" based on your 3ish days with a sub par ssd I would say is ridiculous.

ALSO- hope you are doing better as appendicitis does not sound like fun.

 

[OrphanBoy]

I dunno, I'm just giving my experience of it. Whether it's the controller or not - who knows. I don't believe going from 70 MB/s to 170MB/s would have changed my opinion. I've read many reviews, but I've just been swayed by word of mouth. There was a guy on here recently who was saying that it was so life changing that he couldn't convey how awesome it was via the power of text. This is what I'm talking about! This doesn't sound like 20% improvements in game load times (maybe he was just eager though)

Also, if a £150 mid-range drive can't prove to me that they're worth the money, how much do I need to spend to finally see the difference? Should I buy two £300 drives and RAID them together? Granted, compared to a normal un-RAIDed drive it's snappy. But I still couldn't tell the difference between this and my normal RAID array.

(and yeah I appreciate three days is too brief - I still reckon imaging over a copy of Windows would be a better start)

 

[marscay]

Has anyone else been disappointed by SSD drives?

No not at all but then i don't have the problematic Core drives either, they do take some setting up to get the most out of them by all reports.

Working well it's impossible to not notice the benefits SSD brings, HDD bottlenecks were the bane of any high end PC in the past.

Also, if a £150 mid-range drive can't prove to me that they're worth the money, how much do I need to spend to finally see the difference?

The Samsung 64gb are great performers at a nice price, they have 64mb onboard cache.

Should I buy two £300 drives and RAID them together? Granted, compared to a normal un-RAIDed drive it's snappy. But I still couldn't tell the difference between this and my normal RAID array.

Raid won't help anything but sustained transfer speeds, ie copying files/extracting files etc .....the benefit SSD brings is near instant access speed and Raid can't do anything to improve this.

You're much better off buying a good SSD's with cache than worrying about Raid.

 

[Lanz]

Core SSDs are generally considered useless now unless you run with a raid card with onboard ram. It's no suprise you are dissapointed, thousands of other people are/were.

If you bought a decent SSD your conclusion would have been much more positive. Even the cheap Samsung SSD I have in my budget Dell Mini 10v out performs these broken Core drives.

Flog the drive and buy a Samsung, or spend more and get something decent.

 

[SlyReaper]

Yeah the OCZ series have a bit of a bad reputation because of the jmicron controller and the lack of cache. I would imagine this is the source of your woes.

 

[OrphanBoy]

Maybe my expectations were too high? I mean it's not like the drive was slow, it just wasn't earth-shatteringly pants-wettingly mind-blowing. If you can dig it
To the people who have mentioned caches - how are they gonna improve performance? Windows already maintains a read and write cache (which is often hundreds of megabytes in size), so what's a smaller one on the disk gonna do?

To the people who use these things all the time - do you keep the data you're working with on your drive, or on a regular hard disk? For instance if I was coding and I kept all the source and temporaries on a regular hard disk, I'd see no advantage. But the thing is only really big enough for Windows and programs, and maybe some data too.

(btw, I didn't pay for it - but I did have a budget and we needed 60 gigs)

 

[Lanz]

There are hundreds of threads all over the net (and here) about the issues with the Core series. All of your questions have been answered before.

Bottom line is, the Core series of drives (and others using the same technology) are flawed, and really shouldnt be for sale anymore as no matter what tweaks you do to your OS, they will perform badly under certain circumstances.

They (OCZ) should just flog em all for about £40 now, get rid of the stock and only sell working SSDs.

 

[OrphanBoy]

There are hundreds of threads all over the net (and here) about the issues with the Core series. All of your questions have been answered before.

Again, I think my point may have been missed - I didn't have any problems with this drive. It's not slow. It is snappy. It's far more responsive than the dog-slow RAID1 that I have at work! I just think they're overhyped.

I think I've just been excited too much by graphs which show synthetic tests of SSDs vs HDDs. So for instance let's look at an SSD that costs twice as much eg [H]'s video review of the Intel X25-M*. Yeah load times etc are better than the RAID set ups but it's not a complete paradigm shift is it?! In a few years maybe. Am I missing something?

*sorry if I'm not allowed to link here due to US ads

 

[sja360]

the core you've tested is not the best ssd on the market and also your boss is a bit silly just buying one of them without checking other models of ssd. i would personally have bought in some samsung ssd's. they're only £90 for the 90MB/70MB (read/write) or £137 for 220MB/120MB (read/write) for the newer generation. both are 64GB also. there are other's like the vertex and so forth but samsung for me are a pretty decent and reliable company.

 

[Hatter The Mad]

I just think they're overhyped.

You're basing your opinion on a flawed, el-cheapo SSD. It is not a valid conclusion.

Once past the BIOS I was at the desktop within twenty seconds, not two like I'd expected.

lol, what?? Why did you expect that?

 

[JonJ678]

I still like the core series. If ocz cut the prices on them I will buy another, possibly several. It isn't that much effort putting /tmp, /var/log and /var/tmp into tmpfs at which point almost all the small writes disappear and with them the problems of the controller. I'm sure this is possible in windows as well, just less obvious than with linux.

It is then fast, cool and power efficient. When I have a laptop again I will want one of these drives for it, I regret selling my nc10 which was using one. Buying hardware unfit for the application you have in mind is user error, not a problem with the hardware.

If you decide it's outragously rubbish and would throw it out, please post it this way instead. Lovely drive.

Comprehensive review btw, if a little flawed as mentioned by other people. Appreciate the effort that went into it.

 

[OrphanBoy]

You're basing your opinion on a flawed, el-cheapo SSD. It is not a valid conclusion.


lol, what?? Why did you expect that?

Hype, man, hype! I agree I have only used one drive (I'm not arguing that). I really need to find some of those evangelical posts that I've seen on here recently about bed-wetting performance... And £150 (or whatever they paid) is not cheap. It may be compared to the top-of-the line drive, but it's still not a cheap product. It also comes from OCZ's "mainstream" product list - again, I'm expecting it to be inferior to their top products. But I'd still expect some of the awesomeness surrounding SSDs to manifest itself within their mainstream products.

To reiterate - this drive is not slow. I've just been taken in by the hype surrounding SSDs and I'd imagine many other people have been too. I'd just like to present an opinion to people before drop cash on a drive based on synthetic graphs that they see - if you're gonna buy, try first!

Finally - this drive was not bought to run Windows. It's gonna be used as a video recording drive in an embedded system (we need to record a lot of uncompressed video) and the specs of the drive do meet the needs of the application.

 

[Paramount]

An SSD is not a RAM drive, it'd be cool if it worked like that but sadly no.

You paid £150 for an 'old tech' piece of hardware. For a measly £5 more you could have bought the latest tech (at the same capacity too). More than double the read speed, and loads of cache too.

Hang your head in shame!

 

[miniyazz]

I dunno, I'm just giving my experience of it. Whether it's the controller or not - who knows. I don't believe going from 70 MB/s to 170MB/s would have changed my opinion. I've read many reviews, but I've just been swayed by word of mouth. There was a guy on here recently who was saying that it was so life changing that he couldn't convey how awesome it was via the power of text. This is what I'm talking about! This doesn't sound like 20% improvements in game load times (maybe he was just eager though)

Also, if a £150 mid-range drive can't prove to me that they're worth the money, how much do I need to spend to finally see the difference? Should I buy two £300 drives and RAID them together? Granted, compared to a normal un-RAIDed drive it's snappy. But I still couldn't tell the difference between this and my normal RAID array.

(and yeah I appreciate three days is too brief - I still reckon imaging over a copy of Windows would be a better start)

Unfortunately, this entire post shows you do not understand enough about SSDs to make an informed decision about buying one. Have a read of this - long, but worth the read.
Transfer rates matter little, the transfer rates on the drive you tested are perfectly adequate unless you are wanting to do lots of file copying operations. Generally the reason most people buy SSD is for general OS snappiness, for which transfer rates over the speeds you had are fairly irrelevant, in the main. For the same reason, the main reason for RAIDing SSDs is for increased capacity, not speed.
As mentioned, your boss would do better to buy a drive that isn't 6 months old (a long time in SSD) and fundamentally flawed. You will get far better performance out of many other drives on the market that are cheaper.
And as for testing it at work, testing an SSD, or any hard drive, over USB.. well, what did you expect?

Edit: and uncompressed video is one of the things you would be wanting high transfer rates for. Cue OCZ agility/vertex, G.Skill Falcon, Intel X25-M.

 

[Ninja Please!]

There was a guy on here recently who was saying that it was so life changing that he couldn't convey how awesome it was via the power of text.

I actually think that was me

Although I didn't use the words "life changing" but it's pretty amazing when you have a rig like mine and somthing like an ssd is really able to rock it's boat. Also laptops aren't designed to run like an i7 beast so there is a chance we could have the same drive and I could be more excited about it, being able to really push it. I would think that even decent specs though would still be able to utilize ssd's to their fullest. But seriously look at sites that allow customers to leave their own reviews about their purchase and look for the drive you used. It isn't pretty.

 

[DanPhillips]

Hype, man, hype! I agree I have only used one drive (I'm not arguing that). I really need to find some of those evangelical posts that I've seen on here recently about bed-wetting performance... And £150 (or whatever they paid) is not cheap. It may be compared to the top-of-the line drive, but it's still not a cheap product. It also comes from OCZ's "mainstream" product list - again, I'm expecting it to be inferior to their top products. But I'd still expect some of the awesomeness surrounding SSDs to manifest itself within their mainstream products.

To reiterate - this drive is not slow. I've just been taken in by the hype surrounding SSDs and I'd imagine many other people have been too. I'd just like to present an opinion to people before drop cash on a drive based on synthetic graphs that they see - if you're gonna buy, try first!

Finally - this drive was not bought to run Windows. It's gonna be used as a video recording drive in an embedded system (we need to record a lot of uncompressed video) and the specs of the drive do meet the needs of the application.

Lo Si ?

Should have got a Vertex, 2 in raid 0 with windows 7 really is bed wetting stuff
Even one in your "embedded" system it would max out the controller

Cheers

Dan

 

[miniyazz]

Lo Si ?

Should have got a Vertex, 2 in raid 0 with windows 7 really is bed wetting stuff
Even one in your "embedded" system it would max out the controller

Cheers

Dan

Si has three in RAID 0

Not sure about one of them maxing out the controller though..
The V2s just don't have the transfer rates for video editing though. If the OS isn't going on there, a regular HDD would give the V2s a run for their money at a fraction the cost. I also question the benefit of any SSD where the OS isn't going on it and high random reads/writes aren't needed - a HDD will do fine for the sequential reads/writes you will be doing, OrphanBoy. Not worth getting SSD just for the transfer rates yet, their purpose is random reads/writes where you can make use of the access times, you'll do better investing in RAID10 IMO.