OCZ Core SATA 64GB Solid State Drive review - Guru3D

[Guru3D News]

OCZ Technology has the honor to be the first ever manufacturer to have one of their SSD drives tested here at Guru3D.com and we have others in queue as well. Despite the negative spins from traditional...

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[Lacusmons]

Good review and i agree that the SSD technology is very expensive. Hopefully it will become more affordable in the near future.

[morbias]

It's not as expensive as I thought it would be, but still out of my price range. The MTBF issue is interesting, I wonder how that would change if you used an SSD as a page file.

[bLinkZor]

Maxishine did a review about this HD and he said that this HD is a velociraptor killer.

[Ven0m]

Good article, but I'd like to see a comparison with:
- cheap high-density drive, like Samsung F1 320 / 640 / 1000GB
- really fast drive - WD VelociRaptor
.. because HDDs used for the review aren't the most recent ones.

This drive costs more or less what you have to pay for 300GB VelociRaptor (which after removing clunky heatsink is one of the quietest disks you can get) or 1.5 Samsung F1 1000GB or 2.5 of 750GB drive.

What do we need - 60GB of super-fast SSD, 300GB of really fast HDD or almost 2TB of fast, but high-latency HDD. Too bad that the capacity is so limited. It's not enough for today requirements (like 30GB for Age of Conan). It may work really well for system, but wouldn't it be better to get WD VelociRaptor?

Personally I have 1TB Samsung F1. It's pretty fast, but response isn't the best. Perhaps it will be better after getting an Adaptec controller. Unless you have super-quiet cooling and no disk vibration dampeners, the noise won't bother you. And for me such SSD wouldn't be that useful. It's too small and I can't see real benefits of using such drive. There's not enough read/write operations on my system partition (4GB RAM here). WD VelociRaptor might be a good upgrade as it could be used for my operating system, programming tools and games, giving improvement in all the areas.

The question is: who really needs such drive? 32GB doesn't seem to be enough for system partition if you use Vista. 64GB version - ok for system and a bit more. 128GB should fit a little more stuff - maybe some extra programs and a few games, but that's only now. In a year it will be just not enough.

I guess that it could be really useful in laptops, especially 128GB version in sub-14" lappies. These computers don't need tons of storage space, but low power consumption, good disk standby possibilities, super-fast response time and better vibrations tolerance should make SSDs a good option. Not just "good" - it's a great option.

If I was going to buy a small pricey laptop with good battery life, I'd get one with SSD for sure. I think that in such case it's worth extra money. For my desktop... not a chance, unless I can see a bigger one *AND* a direct comparison, where it wipes the floor with WD VelociRaptor.

// EDIT //
After Finchwizard's post, I decided to add these links to allow PCMark Vantage comparison with big drives, like Samsung F1 (they reviewed 1TB model, but 320 and 640GB ones should have similar performance), IBM DeskStar and UltraStar:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...oundup_20.html
and WD VelociRaptor:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...iraptor_7.html

Huge drive performance is behind in terms of real-life usage, but it's still acceptable. Big files read/write speeds are almost as good as with SSD.
There's a big difference in application loading and gaming tests, even compared to WD VelociRaptor. Is it worth 4.5x more money? Perhaps, if you have loads of it.

[Finchwizard]

Few points for the above poster.

I think comparissons between large drives are kinda useless, because they all have high latencys, it's the nature of the drivers, the bigger you go, the slower they get, they are there for storage at the present time.

SSD's are there to address that problem, speed.

Keep in mind, SSD is still a HUGELY new technology compared to a 20+ year technology like hard drives are. They're increasing at a great rate now, and they will probably catch up in the couple of years.

But until then, the most ideal situation is to have a RAID of SSD's for all your stuff, and anything that is just there for storage, have on the traditional drives.

[Leedow]

Comparisons between traditional harddrives vs SSD is important in order to see the difference between the technologies. But to compare price/GB is foolish. Sure, the OCZ 64GB SSD is 3,5€/GB but it also has 0,4ms accesstime compared to at least 7ms. At least 40% speed in almost every other way.

You do not pay for the amount of storage, you pay for the speed. Compare this to a ferrari vs a bus. A bus is slow but great for transporting many people efficient. A ferrari is really fast but you can only transport two people at a time. The bus has a great price/person compared to the ferrari.

Price/GB is only interesting in storage. Who will use an SSD for storage? I understand that flash probably will take over the whole storage industry sooner or later. But SSD for storage is simply not interesting for now, unless you own a company and need instant results from a database.

My 2 cents.

I became a member in order to comment the review. I've been watching the news here a long time, but I never found a reason to become a member. Now I did.

Regards
David.

[Cybermancer]

Finally a review! Very informative article. I'm very tempted to get one, or two of those. Just the boot-up time in Vista is very impressive by itself. Right now I'm using a Raptor and it takes about 1 - 1:15 minutes to boot. Reducing that to 21 seconds with one, or two of the SSDs is very, very tempting.

[SirLink]

I know its probably counter productive, but would be nice to see some PATA SSD's for those older devices that could really benefit from solid state. (like my apple tv)

But either way, excellent reading!

[volkov956]

Something about SSD flash drives scares me I think I will wait another 2 years to see how long they really last since they are more affordable and in a few years consumers will voice what happens in a few years if anything.

@sirlink get a 2 way Sata-Pata pata-sata convertor they exist and are cheap

[Joey]

I want a SSD.. but how long till a 256GB SLC drive comes out and costs no more than £150?
What do people reckon.... Christmas? Spring 2009?

[strad]

Originally Posted by Ven0m

Good article, but I'd like to see a comparison with:
- cheap high-density drive, like Samsung F1 320 / 640 / 1000GB
- really fast drive - WD VelociRaptor
.. because HDDs used for the review aren't the most recent ones.

This drive costs more or less what you have to pay for 300GB VelociRaptor (which after removing clunky heatsink is one of the quietest disks you can get) or 1.5 Samsung F1 1000GB or 2.5 of 750GB drive.

What do we need - 60GB of super-fast SSD, 300GB of really fast HDD or almost 2TB of fast, but high-latency HDD. Too bad that the capacity is so limited. It's not enough for today requirements (like 30GB for Age of Conan). It may work really well for system, but wouldn't it be better to get WD VelociRaptor?

Personally I have 1TB Samsung F1. It's pretty fast, but response isn't the best. Perhaps it will be better after getting an Adaptec controller. Unless you have super-quiet cooling and no disk vibration dampeners, the noise won't bother you. And for me such SSD wouldn't be that useful. It's too small and I can't see real benefits of using such drive. There's not enough read/write operations on my system partition (4GB RAM here). WD VelociRaptor might be a good upgrade as it could be used for my operating system, programming tools and games, giving improvement in all the areas.

The question is: who really needs such drive? 32GB doesn't seem to be enough for system partition if you use Vista. 64GB version - ok for system and a bit more. 128GB should fit a little more stuff - maybe some extra programs and a few games, but that's only now. In a year it will be just not enough.

I guess that it could be really useful in laptops, especially 128GB version in sub-14" lappies. These computers don't need tons of storage space, but low power consumption, good disk standby possibilities, super-fast response time and better vibrations tolerance should make SSDs a good option. Not just "good" - it's a great option.

If I was going to buy a small pricey laptop with good battery life, I'd get one with SSD for sure. I think that in such case it's worth extra money. For my desktop... not a chance, unless I can see a bigger one *AND* a direct comparison, where it wipes the floor with WD VelociRaptor.

// EDIT //
After Finchwizard's post, I decided to add these links to allow PCMark Vantage comparison with big drives, like Samsung F1 (they reviewed 1TB model, but 320 and 640GB ones should have similar performance), IBM DeskStar and UltraStar:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...oundup_20.html
and WD VelociRaptor:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...iraptor_7.html

Huge drive performance is behind in terms of real-life usage, but it's still acceptable. Big files read/write speeds are almost as good as with SSD.
There's a big difference in application loading and gaming tests, even compared to WD VelociRaptor. Is it worth 4.5x more money? Perhaps, if you have loads of it.

Why are you defending HDDs ?

The technology is ancient. The only downside to SSDs at the moment is price but that WILL change.

These babies are the future

[SirLink]

Originally Posted by volkov956

@sirlink get a 2 way Sata-Pata pata-sata convertor they exist and are cheap

depending on the size, not sure if one would fit...

do SSD still have the format limitations of HD's? In other words, does that 64GB SSD format at near full capacity?

[Skiddywinks]

Hilbert; Page 4, the photoshoot. You have a line under one of the pictures saying "So here you can see the packaging of the card we are putting through testing phases today". Sure, it's damn sleek and sexy, but I'm fairly sure it's not a card

Maybe a "the" needs to be put before the "testing phases" part as well, but I'm not sure.

Anywho, great review and very interesting. I would love a SSD, but the price is a major off putter.

[Crossfire]

Great review Hilbert!

First SSD review at Guru3D, w00t!


Would be nice to see prices drop, but this is a very new technology so it will probably be a while.

[Norvekh]

Originally Posted by SirLink

depending on the size, not sure if one would fit...

do SSD still have the format limitations of HD's? In other words, does that 64GB SSD format at near full capacity?

It, based on the shots in the review, formats to about 64 billion bytes (about 59.605~GiB). It's simply the way storage device nomenclature is written up. They use a base-1000 scale compared to the octets actually being 1024. It shouldn't format with any broken sectors though unlike a mechanical drive. I'm not sure if I answered your question but I tried.

I'd love to have the 128 GB variant myself, but $500 is still prohibitively expensive. Hopefully by the end of the year they'll drop to around $250-300 range which would be well worth considering to use as a system drive.

[SirLink]

Originally Posted by Norvekh

It, based on the shots in the review, formats to about 64 billion bytes (about 59.605~GiB). It's simply the way storage device nomenclature is written up. They use a base-1000 scale compared to the octets actually being 1024. It shouldn't format with any broken sectors though unlike a mechanical drive. I'm not sure if I answered your question but I tried.

I'd love to have the 128 GB variant myself, but $500 is still prohibitively expensive. Hopefully by the end of the year they'll drop to around $250-300 range which would be well worth considering to use as a system drive.

yeah, thats what I was after... So it will format closer to advertised size... It wasn't too bad when HD's where only 500mb, but at 500gb you loose a lot...

[DougDumitru]

Your wear calculations are way off. This is not an issue of wear leveling or the same part of the device being hit multiple times, but the organization of flash cells and how flash erase operations work. A SanDisk speaker at MemCon08 described this as "the mismatch of application and flash block sizes".

When you write to a flash drive, your write has to be merged into a large structure called an erase block. This erase block can be several megabytes in size. Your calculations assumed that you could do 64 GB of writing to use 1 "wear cycle". You are correct, but only if your 64 GB of writing is 100% linear.

If you write random writes that are shorter than the erase cycle, then the numbers get a lot worse. This is because a short write will use up an erase cycle just the same as a full sized write.

For example, I think the OCZ drive has a floating 4 MB erase block. Thus if you write in 4K blocks, your wearout will be 4 MB / 4K or 1024 times faster than your calculations. Random writes can really wear drives out quickly.

With standard "laptop" usage patterns, the average write is about 10K. This drive has 64 GB / 4MB or 16,000 total erase blocks. Assuming 500 MB of writes/day, at 10K average size, this would use 50,000 erase blocks or just over 3 of 10,000 write cycles. Thus at 500 MB of writes/day, the drive lasts 8.76 years. You should also note that 500 MB of this type of random writes will probably take only about 8 minutes, so wearing the drive out early is definitely doable. At full speed, you should be able to kill the drive in 18 days.

Many flash drives actually have erase counters in their smart registers. You can see this on Linux with 'smartctl'. I suspect the windows utilities can see this as well. This should let you test the drive for wear rates to verify my numbers (assuming the OCZ actually does this).

ps: My company ships servers with Flash storage, so we tend to know far too much about flash wearout and what it takes to keep them alive.

Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
http://managedflash.com

[Classic Satch]

I wonder if you can put two of those suckers in a RAID 0 configuration?

[Ven0m]

Originally Posted by strad

Why are you defending HDDs ?

The technology is ancient. The only downside to SSDs at the moment is price but that WILL change.

These babies are the future

I will keep defending them until I can get SSD at size that will allow me fitting all the frequently read data. Price would have to be at most 2x greater than ValociRaptor or performance difference much more noticeable.

I think that we can hardly get better access times with HDDs unless some miracle happens. WD went with smaller platters to decrease it. The idea works well, but we can't do much with it. You won't beat SSD. A controller with tons of well-managed cache might solve the problem - not completely, but most of it.
Is there a way to "save" HDDs? I can imagine myself a controller with 4+GB of RAM, caching frequent reads, that would be partially managed by OS to predict which parts of data to cache before it might be used, storing data to write in internal RAM and writing it when the disk is idle, perhaps with some kind of UPS to ensure the writes.
Disk usage looks like a set of spikes. You don't need full throughput for desktop PC all the time. Write caching is easy to solve. Defining all the data you may need and reading it at once in proper order would decrease the difference between HDD and SSD performance. But that's only a set of wishes and would require extra effort from developers of all disk-hungry applications (being an application developer myself, I know it means "no, it's not going to happen, at least till we're the only company that doesn't do it").

Sooner or later there will be SSDs that will be accessible for most of the people and we will start using them more commonly. One can't beat such access time with mechanical storage.

There's also a possibility that there will be invented some kind of new, better storage before SSDs price drops and people will stop drooling watching SSDs and will switch to that next-gen solution.

[Skiddywinks]

Originally Posted by DougDumitru

Your wear calculations are way off. This is not an issue of wear leveling or the same part of the device being hit multiple times, but the organization of flash cells and how flash erase operations work. A SanDisk speaker at MemCon08 described this as "the mismatch of application and flash block sizes".

When you write to a flash drive, your write has to be merged into a large structure called an erase block. This erase block can be several megabytes in size. Your calculations assumed that you could do 64 GB of writing to use 1 "wear cycle". You are correct, but only if your 64 GB of writing is 100% linear.

If you write random writes that are shorter than the erase cycle, then the numbers get a lot worse. This is because a short write will use up an erase cycle just the same as a full sized write.

For example, I think the OCZ drive has a floating 4 MB erase block. Thus if you write in 4K blocks, your wearout will be 4 MB / 4K or 1024 times faster than your calculations. Random writes can really wear drives out quickly.

With standard "laptop" usage patterns, the average write is about 10K. This drive has 64 GB / 4MB or 16,000 total erase blocks. Assuming 500 MB of writes/day, at 10K average size, this would use 50,000 erase blocks or just over 3 of 10,000 write cycles. Thus at 500 MB of writes/day, the drive lasts 8.76 years. You should also note that 500 MB of this type of random writes will probably take only about 8 minutes, so wearing the drive out early is definitely doable. At full speed, you should be able to kill the drive in 18 days.

Many flash drives actually have erase counters in their smart registers. You can see this on Linux with 'smartctl'. I suspect the windows utilities can see this as well. This should let you test the drive for wear rates to verify my numbers (assuming the OCZ actually does this).

ps: My company ships servers with Flash storage, so we tend to know far too much about flash wearout and what it takes to keep them alive.

Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
http://managedflash.com

Wow, thank you for taking the time to post that info Doug.

[snave]

OK, so I must admit to being confused: Which would be better? Mount the BOOT on the SSD and the APP on the HD, or the other way round (asssuming the SSD isn't big enough for both)..?

Would it be possible for you to load a known graphic and CPU-intensive game on the system in both configurations and measure the resulting load times and the impact in-game? Something game-wise that isn't about just raw graphic power - like Flight Simulator X for example - might be an incredibly useful experiment... there's a lot of byte-swapping HD action when that little puppy is flying!

Also, what other implications might there be for SSD's from a gaming perspective? Currently we see the rise and rise of massive RAM-stacked GPU's, taking upon themselves the burden of massive file transfers from game to screen. But if the HD is SSD-fast, then latency issues suddenly become redundant - so is there a possibility to use stacked-SSD's as massive gaming resource storage, loading the game from the read/write head equipped Old Skool Drive into SSD `cache memory` from where the game runs until it is quit..? Result: Much less RAM needed in the GPU.
In fact this would seem to be the logical way to use the device, even though it might mean copying the whole app from a HD library into a second space on the system.

And taking this one stage further, how about slot-in gaming modules for a PC? The game is sold mounted on a SSD, one simply slots it in the drawer - and it boots automatically. No need for DVD's and that convoluted, time-consuming installation process... and the HDD just becomes the repository for non-standard files, addons and perhaps game save files. Stuff that isn't latency-dependant, Frankly, it should also pi$$ of the pirates as if you need hardware there's much less point copying software.

Hmm.... food for thought. Great article!

[JPennStar]

I'd buy a 32GB for 100$. Hopefully in a few years as more manufacturers take it on and refine it the prices come down. In three years I bet they'll be mainstream because they are such great performers. HDD are the slowest part of a computer because they physically move. This is a natural progression and is going to be a high demand move for small storage applications such as desktop usage. For servers, however, its probably going to take five years to get up into the 1TB area. But I'm just speculating on the times; but soon.

[RejZoR]

@snave
That would be pretty much return of the cartridges (SNES,N64 etc). I doubt it'll happen, though i wouldn't say it's impossible. It would eventually get pirated anyway as anything else...

[snave]

Originally Posted by RejZoR

@snave
That would be pretty much return of the cartridges (SNES,N64 etc). I doubt it'll happen, though i wouldn't say it's impossible. It would eventually get pirated anyway as anything else...

Exactly. Cartridge. Why on Earth should we have to install something to play a game? Do I have to load programming software to use my TV remote? No.

I can certainly envisage the time when SSD's are used as both storage and installation `carriage` but in the meantime we have what we have today - and only a combination of SSD and HD is going to supply both the capacity and the speed, so it is a good question to ask as to where best to make use of the SSD, or if there might be a new hybrid way to make use of it - extracting a game from `deep storage` on a platter-type drive so that it can be run from the SSD is really only cacheing applied in a slightly different way.

In fact one might also consider that using the lightning transfer times it might make sense to see a CPU with cache memory capable of taking the whole content of a SSD drive - from flash memory to volatile flash memory is about as quick as it gets...