OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD Review

By Joe Evans

CrystalDiskMark & Anvil IOPS

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 – Intel Z97 Platform

OCZ ARC 100 240GB - Crystal Disk Mark

Benchmark Results: As with the AS-SSD benchmark, we see overall performance drop somewhat on both reads and writes but the overall performance remains high with good 4k numbers as well.

There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

OCZ ARC 100 240GB - IOPS Read OCZ ARC 100 240GB - IOPS Writes

Benchmark Results: Though the rated spec for IOPS reads is 75K, we saw closer to 80K which is also what we saw on the writes which is dead on the specification. These are very good numbers for a budget drive and it’s always good to not have one lagging.