OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD Review

Performance Degradation Testing

When we first started benchmarking the OCZ Vertex EX last week we ran HD Tach first and got the following results.

Just for fun we ran HD Tach again at the end of testing period and the results were rather shocking.

The OCZ Vertex EX 120GB was used for benchmarking purposes only and never even had an operating system installed on it during the test period. Even though this SSD uses SLC NAND and is priced at $1299.99 shipped for the 120GB model that we are testing here today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suffer from degradation issues like the rest of the drives. When the drive was brand new and just installed it was seen having 228MB/s read and 214MB/s write averages. Now that the drive has been through our benchmark gauntlet the performance has decreased down to an average of 204MB/s read and 74MB/s write. This means we lost 139MB/s or 65% of original write speed due to drive degradation. Since the Vertex EX SSDs firmware doesn’t yet support TRIM or the wiper utility there really is no way to get the drive performance back.