OCZ Vector 180 SSD Review (240GB/480GB/960GB)

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

240GB

480GB

960GB

With no surprise, ATTO reveals sequential read and write speeds that are in line with specs. Reads reach 557MB/s and writes reach 534MB/s. However, looking closer at the 0.5KB, 1KB, and 2KB file sizes we can see that the read performance does not seem to scale with the write, but once it reaches 4KB performance increases significantly from 13MB/s to 245MB/s! When looking at everything else, we can see performance pretty much lines up with what we seen in the previous Vector 150. Let’s see how it performs in our next benchmark…

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

240GB

480GB

960GB

Overall, we can see very similar performance out of each capacity. Sequential speeds reach up to around 510MB/s read and 520MB/s write. 4K read and write reach about 33MB/s read and a very impressive 160MB/s write! OCZ calculated their IOPS rating via this benchmark’s 4K QD 32 test and thus, we will show you how. In order to convert MB/s to IOPS you simply use this equation: (MBps Throughput / KB per IO) * 1024 Thus, for the 960GB model: (395.2MBps/4KB)*1024 = 101,171 IOPS read! By doing the same for writes we can see that the 960GB model also hit 94,310 IOPS. The 480GB model reached 99,405 IOPS read and 93,773 IOPS write while the 240GB model hit over 95K IOPS for both read and write. So here we are able to see the 960GB model achieved its 100K IOPS rating while the rest are slightly under it.