Hardware OCZ Apex 120GB SSD

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/02/09/ocz-apex-120gb-ssd-review/1

The SSD arms race is hotting up, with the latest Samsung NAND flash based drives going toe to toe with Intel's high performance SSDs. We find out how the OCZ Apex 120GB, featuring dual disk controllers and quoted read speeds of 230MB/s write, fares.

 

SSD has prove to be that much faster at all. This Number game of Transfer Rate is like Mhz War on CPU all over again.

We need Fusion IO speed at the cost of current SSD. Capacity isn't a problem. 80GB of Main SSD will do, we need HIGH IOPS and HIGHER Random Data transfer......... we need SPEED!!!!!!!

 

Interesting but,overall still too expensive no matter how you look at them.If you have money to burn,go for it!

 

we also need lifespan iwod.. SSDs are based on flash which has a finite read write limit. I don't want to have to replace a drive or have it losing capacity the more I use it.

 

Nice review, I guess there is hope for the OCZ drive as a firmware update should allow it to compete with the g.skill one.

 

The sawtooth pattern makes me wonder if one of the "sides" of flash memory is significantly worse than the other or something.
When my primary hard drive next dies I will get whichever looks best then, but there are currently too expensive for me to consider upgrading with no prompt.

(the drive appears to gain an extra 8GB on the Crysis load times btw)

 

The value of benchmarking SSDs is greatly reduced if you don't give us comparisons of random read and write iops..

 

It's funny... the first drive I bought would have set me back more than £300 per GB, the next was £10 a GB, the one after that £1 a GB, now for mechanical HDDs, it's more like... what, £0.10?

That being said, the day I pay more than about £0.50 a GB for a new drive now, I'll be earning a quarter mil. Which is never going to happen, so SSD prices need to drop quite a lot. That and their longevity increase... I've still got a couple of old HDDs running in hardware firewalls, with logs getting written to them, so they still work... the older drive has just broken 13 years old. I don't see an SSD that's constantly being written to doing that.

 

Personally I don't care too much about the lifespan, mostly because I upgrade too often and as fast as ssd's are moving on it is very unlikely that someone would consider using current ssds in 2 or 3 years still.

Shame that they still loose against mechanical hdds i some situations, I really hope the including of cache with future versions will fix that.

 

"The SSD arms race is hotting up", The SSD arms race are heating up?

But anyways, how reliable are these SSD's specifiably only for operating system to be installed in? And which brand would you recommend OCZ or Kingston?

 

No, it is the race (singular) that is heating up, not the arms (plural).

 

I have to agree you need to inculde random read and wtite results as ssd can realy suck when you thow a lot of write and read at the same time (look at anandtech review on poor ssd I am on google phone g1 take me to long to find that review nnot worked out how to copy and paist yet on it)

 

well at least SSD pricing/performance is improving with each new generation of drives.

 

"...although four mechanical drives will obviously draw more power, have a higher failure rate, create more heat and be much noisier.""

How about: one mechanical disk? lots of storage, and way more money left for other things. And not the high failure rate, heat and noise from 4 disks.

 

Could be you guys are seeing the "stutter" several other review sites have commented on regarding the previous generation of SSD drives. Comments over at the anandtech forums indicate that the stutter has been reduced but not elimiated with the Titan series of drives.

Are you completely filling these drives before any testing is performed? Because performance definitely goes down after the first "virgin" write is done across the drive.

 

i hope that by the time i buy my next hdd it will be solid state. keep it up peeps.

 

The last chart on page 6 - the G.Skill wants to be 128GB, not 120 and the Apex wants to be 120GB instead of 128.

 

sooo for the same price...
i could setup 4 1TB spinpoints in a raid 10 (or 01...or 5 or 05 whatever you prefer) , have 2TB of storage and redundancy and a good speed...

 

We've added an addendum with OCZ's official comment, as well as an updated price which features a healthy and far more competitive £60 drop to £285!

 

i most likey get SSD when it comes in 512gb form (not crap Jmicron>others SSDs) and is less then £300, that replace my 2x1tb WB Black hdds (3 platter vers) 300GB per drive letter (C: OS / D: games) keeps the hard disk data in the fast part of the disk and closer togever for access time

wish all the sites would dump the older SSDs or just Not restock them so it can be easyer to find the good ones, that many ssds now and so many names need an list, any one got one that lists them all