OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD
By Darren Murph 
posted February 19th 2010 1:01AM
posted February 19th 2010 1:01AM
posted February 19th 2010 1:01AM
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Yum, but I think I'll still hold out for the 6Gbps flood.
@Elaith
Right!
Do you also wait to be 6 lanes free to drive your car?...
@nomadewolf
You do realize current drives reads are limited by 3gbps SATA, right? And preliminary tests have shown Sandforce writes are right there.
@Trevize how do you figure that? 270MB/s = 2.1Gbps. seems like there should be plenty of bandwidth on a 3Gb bus for 2.1Gb
I'm not a fan of a "limited edition" for computer products. That usually translates as "limited support later on."
@bmarcher
I'm not a fan of "100GB ($399.99) and 200GB ($829.99)"
@bmarcher
OCZ's support is "limited" for all their SSDs, regardless of what they call them. I've got (2) 120GB Vertex drives, both of which were bought a couple months after release, and I am regretting the purchase.
Between the early flashes (required because the drives were flaky as hell in the early firmware revisions) that wiped out your data, and now the non-destructive flashes that don't reliably work, leading OCZ support to just say "Your drives are defective, send them back to us" without any kind of troubleshooting, I've had enough. Once the sandforce chips are out in the wild, and once someone other than OCZ is selling them, I'll pickup a pair and eBay these crappy Vertex drives.
3 Gb/s can handle 270 MB/s just fine.
3 * 1024 / 8 = 384 MB/s
@FitFan
Maths is good. I guess there might be some control/header type overhead, but that should fit in the remaining bandwidth.
Given that sonnet recommend a 5 drive RAID on a 3Gb/s SATA to play back 1 stream of uncompressed HD. It might mean this thing could nearly do it all by itself. Pity they aren't terabyte drives. 200gig of uncompressed 1080i only gets you about 30min. Ah well another 3 years I guess. Then we can stuff 5 of these at 1TB into a lightpeak RAID or whatever else comes along and finally do some editing. Not long to wait.
In the meantime..
One drive to soak it all.
@Cy Starkman
Damn right. Even with Core i5's, it still takes 2 minutes per render! Too bad it'll be another 3 years yet before we can cut that time in half.
@FitFan
SATA uses 8b/10b encoding so you lose 20% right from the start, and then with other overhead SATA/3.0 aka SATA/300 aka SATA II is limited to < 286MB/sec.
@looselycoupled
"aka SATA II is limited to < 286MB/sec"
... which is still plenty for a drive with a max throughput of 270 MB/s.
@FitFan Actually this is a common mistake. 3Gbps =/= 3GBps
3Gbps stands for 3 Giga bits per second
And 3GBps stands for 3Giga Byte per second
So, the math goes:
3 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000= 3000000000 bits per second = 3000000000/1024/1024/8 = 357.6 MB/s
NOTE: 1Byte = 8bit
P.S.: Your point stands. Just a minor 'correction'
@nomadewolf
LOL. Why do you think I divided by 8 in that equation? It looks like you're using base 10 numbers instead of base 2.
@FitFan
I use base 10, cause that's what the manufacturers use... Why do you think when you buy a 1.5TB HDD it actually has only 1.3/1.4?... That's what they use... So that's the math i have to do. (just in case i want to know exactly the numbers...)
Please note that i only used base ten when multiplying. I used to make the same mistake that you did, i just thought you and whoever is reading would like to have such a thing clarified. If you don't, just ignore it.
Ok Industry. I appreciate all the work you're throwing in to make your devices go UP in awesomeness....
But how about workin on makin the price go... DOWN?
@Teslanaut
Eh, doesn't really matter. It's just expensive and "limited edition" for now. In a few months every SSD maker will have these controllers in their products and the price will drop like a rock. Really no reason to go for this unless you want the fastest single SSD since for the price you could pretty much pick up 2 SSD's and just raid them.
@midnightblade Limited or not, SSD's are still painfully, pricy :(
In 6 month, this drive will be mass produced and sold for half the price.
@KGB
Hopefully you're right, I would love a 400gb version with these kinds of speeds in my MBP.
Bah, give me SATA III, or give me prices half (or smaller) that size.
Just because I'm drooling doesn't mean I'll shell out $400 that won't reach it's full potential
$400 for 100GB isn't that bad if the drive is faster than the Intel drives. As for price, that's not really OCZ's problem, they just buy flash chips from somewhere. The flash chip makers are responsible for pricing.
@YpoCaramel
And the people at OCZ work for free?
BTW..Amazon has the 200GB drive for sale now for $920.
@KGB Not saying that OCZ doesn't add costs, but the MAIN driver of costs is the cost of the flash chips. Sheesh. Or can you show me a cost analysis that shows that SSDs are expensive because OCZ and Indilinx take huge cuts out of the technology?
@YpoCaramel
Can you show me its not??
@KGB Weak, mate. You didn't even try to prove me wrong with facts and figures, so I did the research. I wasn't 100% right, OCZ does get some pretty good margins on SSDs, but it's not necessarily crazy and NAND memory prices do matter.
"The greatest cost component of any SSD is its memory. Flash SSDs use NAND, and RAM SSDs use DRAM."
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html
The controller makers aren't taking that much of cut:
"JMicron's current 602 controller costs $10 to 12, while the Indilinx is $15"
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/05/28/jmicron-612-ssd-controller-to-feature-cache/1
Some interesting discussion here. NAND memory sourcing is what accounts for the $50 difference between the OCZ Agility and Vertex ($350 and $400 at Newegg respectively) apparently.
"http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?65027-Price-Increase"
So yes, NAND memory prices are HUGE driver of costs for SSD memory.
OMG!!! Just 3Gbps??? WTF???
Like it will ever get near the 3Gbps...
@nomadewolf
You do know that the SandForce chips are maxing out 3Gb/s SATA, right?
@Jason Litka
Let's be fair, it's enough... Maybe a litle points in some benchmarks, but benchmarking is not the regular use for a drive, so one can't even perceive the marginal difference... Also, with the wearing these drives get just after 1000 Read/Write operations the difference would probably be even smaller, so... whatever...
OWC already has the same drive out for a similar price its called the mercury extreme, its also available in 50gb for 229 for people who need less space
ok, so we are reaching the ceiling of the SATA II tech, but this does not bottleneck on SATA II so why the hate?
The prices are moving the in wrong direction for SSDs lately! They've been going up more then they've been going down. Hopefully this is a temporary situation.
I've got an Intel 80GB Gen 2 drive now for my main system. However I'd like to see some 40GB for around $75 for my HTPC and 200GB for around $150 - $200 for some games. I get the feeling that I'm going to be waiting a while for these prices...
Just another Samsung. God what is Samsung doing. They are making SSD's more expensive for the consumer.