Guru3D - OCZ Vertex 460A Test Panel Group

Hey all, I'll do a quick introduction here before my SSD arrives. Long time member here, most know me well enough from previous interactions, but here's a short bio.

Gamer since the late 80s, started out on Atari 2600, then gamed through the Amiga era, then since 1995, a PC gamer.

Love my hardware, still get the buzz from getting that package with fresh new silicone. Love sports.

Now about the SSD workload. I'll be partitioning mine. I think about 100gb for OS (W8.1 Pro, fresh install) and apps. Currently using a 64gb SSD and it's enough for the OS + APPS, but I think I'll fill up the 100gb if it's available. The rest of the space will be used purely for games. Those games that like a fast SSD. GTA V, Diablo 3, BF4 and a few others will be installed straight away.

I'm partitioning because it'll be easier to keep my games intact in case I need to re-install windows.

Oh, the drive will be used in my main rig, the one listed in spec here.

 

Hi,

I also will give a quick introduction before my SSD arrives.
Been a member of this lovely community since 2006 asking and giving advice wherever my experience would come handy.

I'm a IT Consultant by trade, but PC Gamer by heart.

I will start by trying to use Acronic Clone software at first to see how that pans out and do a fresh install if any issues occures with the cloning process.
I will be installing some of my most demanding games, such as Total War games, Civ, GTA V, BF4 etc.. I will also do some game recordings and video editing from the SSD also.

 

I've been a member here since 2006 and I don't recall when I first started browsing the site. Needless to say I've always returned. I was always interested in PC gaming as kid since even on a low end PC it opened up possibilities which didn't exist on consoles. That's part of the reason why early on I got into learning about PCs.

The workload planned aside from the usual absolutely everyone does is some gaming, photo editing, and occasional video encoding. The PC will likely be on for much longer hours than the average user.

My 460A arrived and I used Acronis True Image 2014 bundled with it to clone my previous drive (an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB) then swapped out the old drive. I'm currently using Windows 7 64. The first boot resulted in a crash as I was logging in. On restart Windows detected everything properly (showing the usual 'this thing has been installed' balloon pop-up) and asked for a reboot. On reboot the system did the "disk integrity" (what it calls it) check and found multiple errors which it corrected.

Since that happened I was considering doing a complete wipe and reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch but so far after some tests I haven't found any problems. The only odd thing to note is that my Chrome extensions needed to be reinstalled as none showed. If I do discover anything more serious I will do a fresh installation, but either way I plan on installing Windows 10 in the future. Since the drive was cloned it started with 94GB on it. Here's the initial screenshots:

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EDIT: There was an issue with the Crystal Disk Mark benchmark so I removed it, but it's too late to give a proper replacement now since the drive is in a very different state. My future updates will have the CDM benchmark included again.

The contents are what you expect, the mounting bracket, screws, paperwork, and the SSD itself. It's all perfectly neat so the packaging is better than it was back in the Vertex 3 days:

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Hey!

Gaming is my biggest passion since I was a kid, I had a few consoles in the early 90's but they were some crappy knock-off machines, the only ones available in those times here. It wasn't until the mid-late 90's when I started to really get into PCs. Doom, Quake, Diablo 1 etc. were some of the first games I really played to death and I think revolutionized PC gaming. It was around that time when I also got my first PC, but since the internet was slow (or non-existent at first) I also spend hundreds of hours in "internet"-cafes, which were more lan party gaming saloons, and yes, Counter-Strike&Quake 3 reigned supreme. When internet at home started to get decent, I decided to give WoW a try and played rather hardcore from 2005-2010, and although very time consuming, I still count those years as my best online gaming experience.

Guru3D has been my primary source of hardware reviews and driver downloads almost since it's initial launch in early 2000's, that was also the time when I started "building"(I had help) my own PCs. It took me some good years of lurking before I finally registered to the forum in 2005, under a different name (Diabolix), but changed it since I stopped using that nickname many years ago. I'm happy to be part of this community, and look forward to giving my input in this testing project.

Although the SSD has not arrived yet, I plan on using it mainly for high-end games like GTAV, BF4, Witcher 3, SW Battlefront (each of these games are/will be 50+ GB in size) that do benefit greatly from the speed (and space in the case of OCZ Vertex 460A's 480GB) of an SSD. I will also put my downloads folder on it (which has a LOT of traffic).

Below are my extended current (yet aging) system specs, everything (except the new GPUs) is from 2012, with some small parts like the Corsair SSD purchased in 2013:

As you can see I have quite a lot of storage drives, so when the new SSD does arrive I'll have to do quite some re-arrangement, in order to fit both this and my old SSD on the 2x Intel Z77 SATAIII ports that my board has and move the HDDs under them. I might have to give up the 2 ancient 1TB WD's, since they take too much space for the size they offer, but I'm not sure yet. I might also alternately give up the optical drive since I don't really use that anymore, I'll have to see.

I will post my first impressions/photos/benchmarks as soon as the SSD arrives and I get to install and move the drives up a bit in my case, so that might take a while since I only have the required time in the weekends (so hopefully it arrives tomorrow or Saturday! ).

 

Nice one Solfaur. I will also post pics of the drive as soon as it arrives. Have another 2.5 weeks off until I start my new job, just been offered a position at Four Seasons Hampshire. So feel free to congratulate me.

Question. I have Steam installed on my HDD (Drive D. When this new SSD arrives, I'll partition it like I said, 100gb for OS + APPS, rest for games. I'll still keep steam on drive D:, but will have 2 download locations for steam games. The less drive intensive games will remain on the HDD, the more drive demanding games will go on the SSD (GTA V etc).

What is the best way to move my GTA V installation from D: to the new SSD? From what I gather, I can just set the download path in steam to C:\xxxxxx and then copy the files over?

 

Congrats!

Just backup GTAV Steam folder, and then in Steam "delete local content", then start the new download to new location, pause, exit Steam, copy the GTAV Steam folder you previously saved to the SSD and then when resuming in Steam it should automatically be detected and configured. This method is a bit "raw", but I'm not aware if Steam implemented a moving option, besides having more than one Steam install locations. I also used this method with Origin many times when moving games back and forth from my small SSD to HDD.

 

Ah, cheers, that's what I'll do. I've done this with Origin in the past, start download, let it create the location, folders... then stop the download, copy the files over, then it just verifies the content. Cheers, I'll do it the same way on Steam

 

A bit about myself.

I have been a member of Guru3D since December 2004, i currently live in Manchester UK am 36 and I'm an administrator. Over the years i have used Guru3D to get advise on various things and really enjoy the various reviews/articles. Back when i 1st joined i was one of the 1st people to do the old Readers Rigs under my old user name of Stoner-Pimp (now called rig of the month), it was very nice to have my setup at the time featured on the site (its actually still there looing like a joke compaired to the current rigs of nowadays: Stoner-Pimp Readers Rigs ). I stopped posting for a number of years after my last PC finally gave up due to the power supply at the time (the one talked about in the readers rig article), and when i say it gave up - i actually mean the PSU exploded (not joking) and it took out almost every component in the PC at that time.

About my PC/How it is used.

The PC in my information is my only PC, its mostly made up of AMD components due to price, it works well and is always maintained to keep it clean, running smoothly and at its peak performance. It did used to have an SSD but it was sold off a little bit back as i needed money during a bit of a financial crisis as it was the easiest thing to sell from the PC whilst still keeping the PC running. The PC is running Windows 8.1 and its running this off a 1tb HDD setup (its 2x500gb drives in Raid), it was really shocking to say the least when i removed the SSD - before i had one i didn't really notice the system speed but after removing it, it really is weird at how much you notice the system has slowed down when just running HDD's.

My PC is used almost all of the time due to it being my entertainment centre, its used for gaming, TV, movies, work, surfing the net and pretty much anything else PC related - its easily on almost the entire time I'm in the house and until the late hours of the night. My PC is my main media hub as its wired directly to my living room TV and is used for everything (the PC is stored in a small room in the hall and wired through the walls into the living room), i don't have a sky box or anything like that and all my TV/Movies are watched via my TV card, Blu-ray drive or streamed online.

If there is anything you want to know/ask regarding the SSD and usage, please feel free to do so and i'll answer anything i can.

 

I'll give a quick introduction and expand upon it when my drive arrives, as well as take a few pictures!

A little about me

I've always been interested in technology, especially anything gaming related from a very young age. I was (un)fortunate enough to have two siblings with more than a decade on me, so I had access to their gadgets from the moment I was able to pick up a controller. My brother especially was keen on his gaming back then, although I probably spent more time than he did messing about with his Atari 2600, and later on his Spectrum ZX 128K and Atari ST. Of course this lead to a life long obsession, which resulted in my eventually joining Guru3D back in 2003 to learn more about certain aspects of hardware.

My computer usage

Coincidentally the system in my specifications is the very one I'll be installing the new drive into, which is used for a variety of tasks. I do most of my gaming on this machine, as well as content creation with the likes of photoshop and a number of other image editing tools. I also encode videos and partake in a number of similar tasks on a fairly regular basis. A large part of my usage involves downloading from the internet and transferring files over my own network, I have a fairly beefy connection so I like to make use of it.

I'd be happy to answer any questions and I'm looking forward to updating everyone with information about the OCZ 460A when it arrives!

 

Hello everyone, I'm Elder III, apparently Neo and I got our units a bit earlier then the rest of the test group (hope you guys read your emails! lol).

I started playing video games in the late 80s on a Macintosh II around 1988 in my Grandpa's home office playing Oregon Trail and MathBlaster. Over the past 15-20 years Computer Hardware, technology and PC Gaming has evolved to the point of being my favorite hobby and at one point a second job for me.

I recently received my new laptop, a Sager NP9772 (Clevo P770ZM), which I am positively stoked about since it's a laptop sporting a true desktop CPU platform. :nerd: It sports an i7 4790k @ 4.0Ghz (for now) a Nvidia GTX 980m, 16 GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, a 1TB 7200 RPM HDD (+ the new SSD) and a 17.3" 1080p IPS screen. This is the system I plan to use the new OCZ 460a SSD in over the next two years and beyond.

This SSD will be used as the OS drive, as well as for a variety of PC Games that I play the most or that will benefit the most from a SSD. The games that I anticipate playing the most on it would be games that are open world and/or stream allot of data back and forth to the SSD/HDD. I will have The Elder Scrolls Online, The Witcher I-II-III, and any other applicable games I anticipate playing in the near future. I also will use this SSD for some light 3D modeling work and some modding of various games (Planet Explorers and TES: series games primarily).

The Box:

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The SSD:

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A nifty 2.5-3.5" adapter:

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Putting it to work:

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SMART:

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OS Partition Benchmarks:

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Non OS Partition Benchmarks

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*I am including OS Partition and Non OS Partition results because I am curious to see what difference may be shown over 2 years time between the two partitions.

 

I'll be using the disk in my desktop which is currently a 4970k with z97 pro motherboard.

My pc is used daily for browsing, email, gaming, development and some other basic tasks.

I'm currently on holiday but I'll get on with the migration of my win8.1 drive as soon as I am back.

 

Hey EU guys, my drive just came by FedEX, installing Windows on it now. Just a heads up so you know yours should be coming shortly too

 

Same here EU guys, FedEx just came about 5 minutes ago and gave me a nice little package - I will be doing my cloning a little later as i am off out soon.

 

Windows installed here, getting my games back up via Steam and Origin now, installing apps. will have everything up and running within the next couple of hours, hopefully.

 

Chances are mine will arrive tomorrow then, looking forward to giving some impressions.

 

Here's a few pics and screenies

This is how I partitioned the drive upon windows install. 100gb for OS/APPS, rest for those SSD demanding games


The SSD and the 3.5" bracket


The box


SMART reading


SSD details


SSD Guru Dashboard


DiskMarkX64 performance

 

Hopefully I will also receive mine tomorrow or saturday. It all depends how FedEx operate in my country, but i fear it's trought the national snail mail, then it won't arrive before sometime next week :/

 

Mine came not long after my last post, I popped it in my system using the supplied 3.5 to 2.5 adapter and used Acronis True Image HD 2014 to transfer my O/S details over from my Agility 3 setup. Pretty good program, although to forewarn anyone else planning on doing this: The version on OCZ's website is an older version that wont allow you to activate the supplied key. You'll need to download the 2014 version directly from the Acronis Website. Other than that it was a smooth experience and I'd recommend the software to anyone planning on changing o/s drives without doing a format.

Here's a few test results:

SSD GURU



SSD Guru SMART



AS SSD



Crystal DiskMark

 

Well all done now, did my usual cleaning the OS up before the cloning - did the restore health online scan, then a windows update check, then a defrag and a full restart. Afterwards I downloaded the Acronis software and did the clone, the clone was very quick in the end (much quicker than the last time i did one) and man its so nice to see Widows load up fast once again - i was so used to it taking a minute or so to load .

Everything is now done and sc scannow now reports no issues and the online scanhealth check reports the same, just finished linking up my game folders back to Steam/Origin etc and everything is working just fine - am going ot transfer over the big games to the SSD later (GTA 5, BF4, TitanFall etc).
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Month 1 Pictures.