OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD Review (256GB/512GB/1TB)

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

Finally, we wanted to see how performance was in a real world use when transferring large files to the SSDs. For this test we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30GB folder of movies and a 10GB folder of small mixed documents files off of one PCIe SSD to the test drives and time how long it takes. Then we do a copy to self test after each. Once complete we can calculate the average speed.

The above results are very impressive with speeds nearly tripling SATA 6Gb/s bandwidth! The RD400 held its own against some of the other top drives in the market. The 512GB model achieved speeds similar to the equal capacity Samsung 950 Pro, and both beat out the HyperX and Intel 750 during the 30GB file transfers. When looking at the 10GB of documents files we can see a drastic slowdown in performance, however, there was minimal difference between each of the SSDs’ performance.

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings. One, idle power consumption. Because most consumer systems are at idle for about 80% of the time, idle power consumption is an important measure to look at when understanding the efficiency of a drive. Next we look at startup consumption. This tells you how much power the device needs during startup and while it is usually more important when looking at HDDs and enterprise class storage, it is still something worth quantifying. After that we did averaged out the active power consumption from the 10GB and 30GB file transfers. Finally, we went through our power logs during testing and listed the maximum power draw.

Here we can see that the results are similar to what we saw with the performance difference between these drives during the file transfer tests, with the Samsung being closer in comparison to the OCZ RD400 than the Kingston or Intel SSDs. Startup power consumption was well regulated. Idle power consumption is just barely a half a watt more than the Samsung 950 Pro. Average consumption for the large file transfers is lower than the Samsung’s while slightly higher for the smaller files transfers. Finally, max power consumption is good at 5-7W, especially when in comparison to the Intel 750, which consumed 10.4W at one point!

POWER EFFICIENCY

Finally, we wanted to post up a graph of the power efficiency of the SSDs in comparison. We are looking at MB/s per Watt in this graph. The higher the result, the better.

In the chart above we can see that the OCZ RD400 and the Samsung 950 Pro are very power efficient during large file transfers. The Kingston HyperX and Intel 750 on the other hand are not in comparison. However, when looking at the smaller file transfers we can see that while the Intel 750 still lags behind, the OCZ RD400s also slightly lag behind both the Samsung 950 Pro and Kingston HyperX Predator.