OCZ Vertex SATA 2.0 60GB SSD

System Setup:

We tested out the OCZ Vertex SATA 2.0 SSD on a Linux system running Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also briefly tested it out on an Ubuntu 9.04 setup and it ran perfectly fine there as well. As soon as the solid state drive was connected it was properly identified as a 64GB OCZ-VERTEX v1.10. During our testing and benchmarking process we had formatted the OCZ Vertex (and the other test drives too) to using an EXT4 file-system.

Our test system consisted of an Intel Core i7 920 CPU that was clocked at 3.60GHz, an ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard, 3GB of CSX DDR3 memory, a 320GB Seagate ST3320620AS HDD for where the Ubuntu operating system was installed, and an ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. When it comes to the software, the key Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 packages included the Linux 2.6.30 x86_64 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.0, and GCC 4.4.1.

Besides testing out the 64GB OCZ-VERTEX v1.10 SSD we also compared its performance to a 16GB STT_FTM16GL25H SSD, 160GB FUJITSU MHZ2160B HDD, and 120GB FUJITSU MHY2120B HDD. The Fujitsu hard drives were standard 5400RPM 2.5-inch disks that are commonly found within notebook computers. The STT_FTM16GL25H is the Super Talent MasterDrive OX, which is another MLC-based SSD and it promises sequential reads of 150MB/s and sequential writes of 100MB/s.

On the two hard drives and two solid state drives that were all formatted to clean EXT4 file-systems, we used the latest Sandtorg code from the Phoronix Test Suite for running these disk benchmarks. Each time the Phoronix Test Suite test installation directory was set to the different drive. The test profiles we ran included PostgreSQL pgbench, IOzone, Dbench, Flexible IO Tester, and the Threaded I/O Tester.