OCZ Vertex 120GB v1.10 MLC SSD Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Benchmark Results: The OCZ Vertex 120GB Solid State Drive has great read and write speeds as seen in the benchmark results above. The drive averages 218.2MB/s read and 171.4MB/s write, which is very fast. Since SSDs don’t have a platter they can maintain these incredible speeds at any position on the drive. Seems that around the half-way point the drive performance takes a minor hit, which is likely something to do with the firmware. The burst speed of this drive was a little lower than expected at 182.8MB/s.

Comparison Chart: When comparing the OCZ Vertex 125GB SSD to other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives you can see that it dominates the four other drives that we have benchmarked on the same test system with the Intel ICH10R south bridge. The only HD Tach RW performance benchmark that the OCZ Vertex didn’t win was the burst speed test, and to that the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB hard drive gets the spoils of victory. The results of HD Tach’s CPU utilization test don’t mean much as the application has a +/- 2% margin of error and the results of the benchmark range between 0-3%, which doesn’t represent a significant difference.