This Just In: OCZ Vertex 2 SandForce-1200 SSD with Special Sauce
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 22, 2010 2:38 PM EST- Posted in
- This Just In
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
Next week I'll have more to report on than just SSDs, I promise. Until then, the SandForce festivities continue with today's arrival: The OCZ Vertex 2.
As you may have heard, the Vertex 2 uses a special brew of SandForce's SF-1200 firmware that gives it the small file random write performance of a SF-1500 based solution, without most of the added cost. Unless Corsair and SandForce work something out, the Vertex 2 is going to be the only SF-1200 based SSD that can use SandForce's MP firmware and attain 30,000 sustained 4K random write IOPS.
I'm running the drive through the ringer now and hope to have results as well as an update to our SSD Bench later this week. If you want to see pics of its internals, check out the gallery.
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Rob94hawk - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Yes SSD's are fast, but they are unproven long term. I've read all of the SSD articles on Anandtech and others and I've come to the conclusion that at this time that the technology is not mature enough to warrant the high premium for them. I'll give them another 2 years.kilkennycat - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
In two years' time how many of the current batch of SSDs will have uncorrectable read errors on data written a week before ? The effective write-read cell lifetime of a MLC flash memory is a joke, and as the processes shrink and the density gets higher, there are fewer electrons/holes available to waste in leakage. And there is no practical way of measuring the residual life of a SSD. Unlike a hard-disk, where a non-correctable block of bad bits can usually be found by some simple write-read tests, a non-correctable block caused by end-of-life cell-leakage cannot be found by a normal write-read cycle - unless you want to wait a couple of weeks between the write and the read..... BTW, just to make you happier, an end-of-cell-life SSD in a computer will have user-symptoms similar to those caused by flaky ram -----mysteriously erratic program-crashes and data-loss.Rewriting the corrupted data might keep things going for a couple of weeks until the cell-leakage again overcomes the SSD error-correction and the PC dies again. Unfortunately the physics-reality of the current generations of flash-memory may upsat all these rosy dreams of the ideal long-term replacement for hard-disks.SSDs do have their place in a PC.... storing programs or data with low rate of change. Ideal for the OS core of a PC; not AT ALL ideal for ANY use as "virtual memory". Better make sure that the PC's 'virtual memory' is always constrained to occupy the available system ram if a conventional hard-disk is not available for that task instead of the SSD.
philosofool - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
but is this the first time in history that everything has gotten better while nothing has gotten cheap. Usually poor dudes like me benefit when all this new fancy stuff comes out, but I'm not seeing the affordable old last-gen stuff....Progress for the rich. The rest of us are waiting.
Taft12 - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
Your comment doesn't align with reality. Sales on Kingston's 30GB last-gen have been $70CAD and Intel's 40GB just over $100CAD. US sale prices surely about the same. You are not looking hard enough.capeconsultant - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
but I really do think they are already more reliable that a spinner. Could you provide more information on why you think there should be no swap file on an SSD?I mean if the current crop of SSD's all of a sudden fail then that would set back sales by a decade or so. And since variations of these drives, but I'll admit not these exact drives, have been around in military and other uses for a really long time now.
Bottom line, my Corsair better be good to my data or I will be wicked pissed!
Chloiber - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
I only read OCZ in the past days/weeks...what about other SSD vendors?Taft12 - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
I was just coming to make the same comment - OCZ sure is buying a lot of front page coverage these past couple weeks!Movieman420 - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
It looks like the SSD has shed it's 'awkward teenage years' and is now coming of age. The only real bummer is that short supply is driving the price of nand memory up...thanx a lot Apple. Anyways...for those who have been sitting on the fence waiting for SSD technology to mature, now is your time. Sure SSDs are expensive but now that a single drive can saturate a sata 3Gb/s channel and can sustain the high write speeds, it shouldn't take much convincing. I was pretty impressed with the real world difference that my first gen Apex made (even with the crap JMicron controller.. >< ) over a pair of raptors in raid0. Then came the Inilinx drives which improved 4k writes and throughput. Now, sata2 bw is maxed, 4k writes are no longer a problem and sustainable write speeds aren't far from matching the read speeds. Now that the technology has matured, all we need is for apple to quit hogging all the nand for their crap wear.BlackDragon24 - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
I'm usualy a pretty early adopter (I've owned 3 x 58 boards so far :)) but I waited a long time to do the SSD thing. Partially because I already had a smoking fast RAID 0 setup with VR's, and partly because of the reliability issue. I've been running an Intel 160GB G2 for the past few weeks and have no regrets whatsoever. Read times are faster and write times are slower, but they certainly don't feel slower. Boot-up times and program loading loading times are non-existent. Games load faster. I don't hear the annoying churning of the VR's.Bottom line is that if you have the money and the know-how, there is no reason to buy a mechanical hard drive any more unless you want large capacities/RAID or you just can't afford the SSD. My mechanical hard drive now functions solely for storage and backup images of my Win7 install on the SSD.
Sabbathian - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
Look, an article about OCZ... cool, interasting... wait, here is another one.... and another, and another!Anand, don`t get to OCZish, cause your great site is starting to look like one big OCZ commercial....