Intel and OCZ: Both Mostly Releasing Other People’s Solid State Drives

There are a couple of new types of fast consumer solid state drives to choose from on shelves; the ‘Intel 330’ and ‘OCZ Vertex 4’ and we’re giving each a quick look (and gorging our geek eyes on something not quite so consumer level too).

All three SSDs are composed of a ‘controller chip’ and 25nm Intel/Micron NAND flash memory. First off the mark has been OCZ, releasing the latest generation of its performance-leading Vertex series. It comes with a hefty bevy of claims; for example “In typical use case scenarios, the Vertex 4 outperforms the Vertex 3 by as much as 400 percent”. OCZ also implies that the drive was designed by its own in-house team... however that is a bit of an exaggeration. After some investigation Anandtech confirmed the Vertex 4 uses a faster derivative of the controller chip in the existing Cruical M4, Corsair Performance Pro and Intel 510 series’ amongst others.

What does make this something of an ‘in-house’ effort is that the OCZ has taken an enhanced version of the Marvel controller found in the other drives and served it up with its own firmware. The resultant specs are certainly promising: read speeds hit 535 MB/s (coming close to the real-world bandwidth constraints of SATA 6Gb/s) and write speeds are around 475 MB/s. The Vertex 4 also sports a blistering maximum 120,000 IOPS (IOPS being shorthand for ‘number of things the drive can per second’). However based on its own testing, as well as independent results, these specs combine to give real world performance below the headlines claimed by OCZ.

For example, while it’s nice to be able to write half a gig of data, and the Vertex 4 certainly does that incredibly well (as well as any SATA drive), desktop users spend far more time reading from a drive than writing to it and in that regard the Vertex 4 is a tad slower than its Vertex 3 predecessor. Overall it is a slight step-up in performance over existing SSDs but given the high price and OCZ’s history of unstable firmware, which occasionally exchanges your valuable data for BSODs and epic rage, the Vertex 4 is difficult to recommend right now. It should still be of interest to professionals, such as video editors, and future updates promise to deliver read speed increases - as well as more certainty that OCZ’s days of testing beta firmware via customers is well behind it, as the company claims. The three launch capacities are 128, 256 and 512 GB, with the larger drives being somewhat faster.

This takes us to the second debutante, the Intel 330 series.  Based (stay with me here) on the hardware that debuted, and can still be found in, the Vertex 3 and a plethora of existing SSDs, including Intel’s own 520 series (albeit the 330 uses slower flash memory). This Sandforce controller is however still more than capable of holding its own, as illustrated above. In another similarity to OCZ, Intel seems to have implemented a firmware entirely of its own making (which as far as we can tell, is unique among the many Sandforces on the market) delivering a very respectable 500 MB/s read, 450 MB/s write and up to 52,000 IOPS. Somewhat dissimilarly from OCZ, Intel has a near impeccable reputation for testing its firmware so very likely your data, and rage (critically important for SW: TOR players) will be safely contained within this drive.

Prices are competitive and with its solid firmware and performance, the Intel 330 series is probably at least a good a bet as the established Sandforce-wielding Vertex 3, Corsair Force 3, Kingston HyperX  and similar drives for an enthusiast. Capacities are 60, 120 and 180 GB, again with the larger drives being a tad faster.

The dark horse is Intel’s newly minted enterprise-grade 910 series drive. Starting at a rather eye watering $US1,929 for a 400GB model, these PCIe 2.0 x8 cards offer up 2 GB/s read, 1GB/s write and 180,000 IOPS. They’re also not ‘bootable’ or all that relevant outside of servers, but do offer an insight into the prospect of (bootable) consumer PCIe cards from Intel in the future along the lines of the OCZ Revodrive. In the meantime... well sweet dreams, Atomicans :)