I bought one of these a pretty long time ago, 1st of January ’11 to be exact. It is currently at £85.99 if you feel like getting one, its gone down by about £10.00 since i got it. The pictures may be a little dusty as the review was done today, not as soon as i got/used it.
The usable space on this drive is 55.90GB which is more than enough to install your operating system on as well as all your programs. If you are thinking about installing games then it would be wise to have a secondary HDD to install them on.
Before i start talking about the drive, lets get some things out of the way. The SATA II limit is 3Gb/s which is NOT 3GB per second, instead it is 384 MB/s (megabytes).
Below are some pictures, beware, when you click them they will load extremely high quality photos for those of you with a bandwidth limit.
The computers specification it was tested on: (ill be upgrading soon haha)
– Intel Core 2 Duo (2.93GHz, Overclocked to 3.30)
– 6GB (4x 2GB) DDR2 800MHz memory
– ASUS P5Q SE PLUS Rev 1.xx (Socket LGA 775)
– 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB SSD
– 640GB WDC WD6400AAKS-65A7B0 HDD
– LITE-ON DVD+RW LDW-401S
– NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO
– OCZ 400W STEALTHXSTREAM power supply
– Alpine fan cooler for CPU
– Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) (build 7600)
Benchmarking utilities:
HD Tune Pro
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64
I started with CrystalDiskMark as it is the simplest one to use and the easiest to interpret results.
Please keep in mind it was being used as the operating system drive for my PC while these tests were taking place so it may not be exactly accurate.
According to CrystalDiskMark:
Sequential speed is 226.5 / 231.3 which means a 1GB file can be read off this drive in around 4.52 seconds and written in 4.23 seconds. To put this in comparison, my HDD got the following sequential speeds; 73.21 / 70.47.
I am going to move straight onto the 4K QD32 test which is where this SSD really shines. My HDD has the following results (read/write); 0.841 / 2.000. This tests the random access as it is reading/writing 500MB in 4K blocks. The SSD managed to do this in a staggering 28.18 / 97.07 which is 33½ times faster than a traditional HDD.
According to HD Tune Pro:
It is not as fast as advertised, maybe there is a fault on my side but hey, I’m not complaining, my computer boots up in under 30 seconds (post bios) all the way until its ready to browse the internet! If you are looking for faster application loading times and generally a better experience on your PC then it is definitely worth getting one of these. When i have friends using the PC they ask me why Microsoft Word loads up so fast, there is barely enough time to read the splash screen.
Here is a result from a friends computer who has the traditional hard drive:
I plan to max out the SATA II bandwidth by raiding two of these in RAID-0 configuration which would then mean there will be no redundancy as the data would be striped across two drives. If you have enough money to invest i would suggest you do the same but bare in mind that you will lose an entire SSD’s storage space resulting in an extremely fast raid array with around 384 MB/s read/write speed hopefully. I can not tell you for certain it will be this fast but it will most definitely be faster than the speed of one SSD.
Below is a video showing you the everyday things you would do on a PC and how fast it is on my computer. I am sure there is something i have overlooked because it should faster than the speeds i am receiving now. What i really love about the SSD is that is makes no noise at all and this is because there are no moving parts unlike a normal HDD. I have my computer set so that only when my HDD is needed, it spins up. When i am not using the computer i really notice how loud a normal HDD is when it decides to randomly spin up. Finally, the last cool feature is the operating temperature. For those of you who did not take a look at the picture above carefully, it operates at ONE DEGREE CELSIUS which is 33.8 degrees fahrenheit. This does not mean a lot to the average person but for me this means i have been able to turn off my three case fans and now the only thing making any hearable noise is the HDD and the whisper of the powerbox. I say whisper because when you walk into the room you would never imagine a PC to be in the room on and fully operational.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and i will try my best to reply!
DUDE who knew following your blog would pay off! This is the exact hard drive i have been looking at for the past week…. I was pretty sure I was going to get this but i saw the Onyx one and the hybrid one which look amazing with more space!!..
First of all, thank you for taking the time to comment, it really is appreciated.
The OCZ Onyx SSD 64GB has a read/write speed of 135 MB/s and 70 MB/s whereas the Vertex 2E has a read/write speed of 285MB/s and 275MB/s. The other main difference is that the Vertex 2E comes with a three year warranty whereas the Onyx has two.
As for the Hybrid Drives, they will never beat pure SSD power. They may increase the results slightly for random reads but as long as it has the disk based structure it will never have the true power. It all really depends on what you want, more space or more power? You could very easily get a 500GB secondary hard drive while using a SSD to boot your OS like i have done 🙂
Just a quick grammar point – “bought”, not “brought” 😛
Ge rid of this comment if you like. Cheers.
Haha thanks for that little correction.
I would never delete a comment like this 🙂
Nice blog and review, keep sharing Umar.
Thanks.