News OCZ to use Indilinx controller in Vertex SSDs

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/02/16/indilinx-controller-in-vertex-ssds/1

Indilinx's Barefoot controller is reportedly forming the backbone of OCZ's new SSDs.

 

Wow. Those look like great numbers. Can't wait to see a review on these!

 

Would be nice to see them compared to Intel's X25-E.

 

can't wait for some reviews too

 

I am glad for the competition, hopefully it will equate to bringing the prices around in a more timely manner.

 

Why do these things needs cache, isn't the memory itself a huge cache...

 

to win burst speed benchmarks...

 

buffer small writes

 

The problem with these drives is that they slow way down within just a few hours of use even when you have TRIM within windows 7. There is NO tool to reset the TRIM for the new vertex 2 as it only runs on the vertex 1, so you must rely on the drive to decide when it wants to TRIM. Then when it does, it doesn't bring your speed back to full, but only about 60%. Like I got 180 MB/sec read seq and 140 MB/sec write on a fast i7 desktop at 3.6ghz. Within one day my write speeds fell to about 85 MB/sec to 100 max. Nothing I did sped it up again. I did do a drive align with Paragon software, but that only improved the 85 MB/sec to 95. Big deal..

Finally I use the the ocz toolbox with one of the very few tools it has which is to clear the drive, or reset it, thus wiping everything out and putting it back to factory new. I put windows back and got 135 MB/sec write, but it was soon 120 before about 2 hours and heading back down. Many other people have complained about this.

Another note, is OCZ only suggest running benchmarks like ATTO which show highly flattering statistics of the drive because they spit out highly compressible data streams in default mode. Using ATTO will show this drive getting like 250 read and 220 write, but the drive isn't really getting that. It's getting like 180 read and 110 write, and then because the stream compresses like 2 to 1 or better, it seems like it's getting 220 write. Switch to it's random mode and voila, it shows the true slowness of this drive. And I mean the OCZ Vertex 2.

I've seen some people try to point all these problems out on the OCZ site only to have OCZ fantards get in the way and stick up for the drive. And then usually an official OCZ moderator will delete these peoples posts. So I'm not going to even sign up for their site. The staff there will try to mislead people and point them to these threads, or stickies which proceed to give flimsy explanations for OCZ Vertex2's slow performance.

Now don't get me wrong. The drive is still way faster than a hard drive when you boot into windows (mostly reading), and it's action on small files is better than a hard drive.... So it does speed the boot process up, and makes loading games better. But what happens is, writing to the drive will slow down to 1/2, and reading will also slow down a bit. The people who know nothing about these drives will still think it's pretty fast, but in reality, it's nothing like what OCZ claimed and it falls short in comparison to other drive makers. For that kind of money, your drives write speed shouldn't be halved. And you shouldn't really end up with 180MB/sec read speed, especially when it's on a very fast computer. It should be better.

After two days, my Vertex 2 had fallen in speed to where it was almost as fast as my Western Digital GREEN 1.5TB drive which gets 108MB/sec read seq, and 105 MB/sec write. The OCZ was getting like 85 to 90MB/sec write, and only 180 or so read which is only 82 more than the HD. Still gives a boost to windows loads, but not so special if you ask me.

 

Also I have a PNY 128GB SSD which got 250MB/sec sequential read and 150 write. Also the 4k and 512k numbers were also very respectable. After 6 weeks of continually copying files, restoring clone partition images, running benches and even formatting it which is supposedly a no no, the drive still got pretty much the same benchmark scores within plus or minus 5. With the 250 MB/sec read and about 150 write included. So even though I nearly beat the drive to death it never slowed. It has no tools that I know of and very little support. But it kept on acting like the first day I bought it. I never had to do anything special to it either.

 

Necro is bad... mkay?

 

make sure you have Not installed (repeat Not installed) the intel matrix drivers that come with the motherboard or From the motherboard makers web site, you should be running the AHCI drivers in <Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller> thats what device manager should be reporting or as would of disabled Trim command,

do not fill the SSD to the Point it runs out of space, as a lot of SSDs end up in an degraded state that only fixable via Low level format (CCleaner will push an SSD into an degraded state, do not use wipe free space option)

get the Intel Matrix drivers From intel web site that must be dated after july 2010 i think, as they do support TRIM even when set to RAID mode in the bios but the SSD in single disk mode (e.g. SSD is not RAIDed as RAID + SSD is still no worky even with updated drivers)

Vertex 2 uses SF-1200 not Indilinx the tool they norm use should Not be needed for SF-1200 drives (unless you filled the SSD to the point it ran out of space then Low level format is needed)

also 1 year bump, Point?