OCZ ARC 100 Linux SSD Benchmarks

The ARC 100 SSDs use A19nm MLC NAND flash memory and a Barefoot 3 M10 controller. This drive is designed to sustain up to 20GB per day of host writes for three years.

OCZ does make it easy for those needing to upgrade their firmware SSD under Linux as they do have a bootable software solution but the OCZ Toolbox and Radeon Toolbox (for OCZ's Radeon R7 SSDs) also has Linux 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. Their closed-source program is slated for compatibility with EL 6/7, Fedora 18-20, Linux Mint 13-17, SUSE 11, and Ubuntu 10.04/12.04-14.04.

This is a fairly basic but economical drive. For getting a sense of its performance under Linux I tested the 120GB OCZ ARC 100 against a few other drives around the office and those used in the recent Transcend SSD Linux benchmarking. All drives were freshly formatted to EXT4 and being tested from a host system running an Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 development snapshot with the Linux 3.18 kernel.