OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC 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 EX 120GB SLC Solid State Drive has great read and write speeds as seen in the benchmark results above. The drive averages 227.9MB/s read and 214.3MB/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. The burst speed of this drive was a little lower than expected at 208.7MB/s.

Comparison Chart: When comparing the OCZ Vertex EX 120GB SLC SSD to other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives you can see that it dominates the ten 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 Kingston SSDNow M 80GB SSD gets the spoils of victory. The OCZ Vertex EX SLC was 25% faster than the OCZ Vertex MLC in the write test! 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.