OCZ Vertex 4 SATA 3 SSD Review – Indilinx Infused and Game Changing Performance Results

TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

Our evaluation today we rely on the use of our newest addition to The SSD Review, our new X79 Test Bench. A quick click on any picture in our report will bring up pictures of a higher resolution.

In testing, our main objective is to obtain results as pure and as accurate as possible and we want to ensure that no anomalies slip through. Simply put, we want to provide you with the absolute best results the tested hardware can provide. Repetition in testing is standard and, if necessary, we may conduct specific tests in Windows 7 safe mode to ensure the OS has little to no influence on the end result.

In order to validate and confirm our findings, testing is supported by industry accepted benchmark programs. All results are displayed through capture of the actual benchmark for better understanding of the testing process by the reader.

We would like to thank ASRock (Fatal1ty Extreme 7), Intel (Core i7-3820), Patriot (Viper Extreme), Corsair (600T/H80), OCZ (Fatal1ty PSU) and Be Quiet (Fans) for supporting the build of our X79 Test Bench.

BENCHMARKING  THE VERTEX 4

In first testing the Vertex 4 with PCMark Vantage and achieving such a questionable result, we considered that similarities may occur in other benchmark programs and we were right.  HDTune was another program where The Vertex 4 didn’t (and won’t) fare well and better proof couldn’t be found than in the 204MB/s transfer speed result of the HDTune Pro Benchmark.

This was a direct contrast to the next test, HDTune Pro File Bench, where transfer speeds above 400MB/s were shown in both read and write performance. If your eyesight is a bit weak as mine is, simply click on the charts for a high resolution shot.

We soon realized that the ‘Indilinx Infused’ Vertex 4 was not a fan of testing with highly compressible data but loved moving incompressible data, as in that of photographs, movies and music.  This was new.  There has never been an instance, that I am aware of, that an SSD did so well with incompressible data yet testing with compressible data ‘in specific programs’ suffered greatly.

In considering this, we went back to PCMark Vantage which, for all intensive purposes is, a program that utilizes eight typical user tests, most of which rely on highly compressible data once again.

Quite frankly, both Vertex 4 SSDs are now installed in my main systems and these numbers we see above are not at all indicative of the performance.  I feel confident that we have covered this sufficiently now so lets see just what the Vertex 4 family does right.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software we will be using for todays analysis are typical of many of our reviews and consist of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and, of course  PCMark Vantage and HDTune Pro that you see above.

These programs should do a great job in highlighting the performance of testing in both hichly compressible and incompressible date.  Much of the software is free and can be downloaded simply by clicking on the linked title.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER 3.9.3

Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, power on information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not greyed out as with APM and AAM. Once again, the results of this software are very simlar for both the 256 and 512GB SSDs so we chose to include the 512GB result.