OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD Review

AS SSD Benchmark

A new benchmark is in the works for Solid State Drives – AS SSD Benchmark. We have never run this benchmark and it just came out this week, so we figured why not and gave it a shot on the OCZ Vertex EX SLC based SSD that we are testing here today.

In the Everest benchmark results we saw that the drive performance degraded during the benchmark and now that we have run the entire test suite on the Vertex EX the drive has become badly degraded. This is the last benchmark we ran and you can clearly see that the performance has degraded badly due to all the benchmarks run on the drive. At this point in time we contacted OCZ asking if they know of a way to get the performance back to where it should be to finish the benchmarks and our testing. Tony from OCZ responded with these statements.

“You need to update to Firmware v1.20 then use wiper 0525, the issue is we have not officially released Firmware v1.20 yet. Then you will need to totally bench the drive again and performance does change slightly. I will ask if we can post the updates up, they are the full in Windows flash so all data on the drives is destroyed.” – OCZ

It seems that our benchmarking stops here and that by running a couple of days worth of benchmarks on the Vertex EX, that we have successfully degraded the performance to a point of no return. Now we just need to wait for OCZ to release a firmware that supports TRIM functionality. They have one, but has not made it available to the public or Legit Reviews.