First OCZ SSD Core Review

Read the review...but the con of

- Steel case does not protect from electrical shock damage
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pretty much made this guy an idiot. However, understanding packaging in relation to electornics is not a requirement for posting reviews on electronics.
 
The best reviews are those with Graphs that make sense, and as few words as possible. No need for more opinion than results-

Btw, I had to RMA my OCZ SSD. I'm hoping it was just a bad drive issue. As I'd hate to think it is an incompatibility issue with the Motherboard SATA controller. Especially since I ordered another OCZ SSD 64GB drive to put in Raid 0. If all else fails, i'll just get a controller card.
 
Griff805 said:
The best reviews are those with Graphs that make sense, and as few words as possible. No need for more opinion than results-

Btw, I had to RMA my OCZ SSD. I'm hoping it was just a bad drive issue. As I'd hate to think it is an incompatibility issue with the Motherboard SATA controller. Especially since I ordered another OCZ SSD 64GB drive to put in Raid 0. If all else fails, i'll just get a controller card.
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I (and certainly many others) hope to hear more about your experiences. This drive is at the top of my list for a 2009 purchase.
 
the best reviews are the ones on sites that aren't whores for advertising money like that last site. what was it, page 6 that finally had a damned chart?
 
novadude said:
the best reviews are the ones on sites that aren't whores for advertising money like that last site. what was it, page 6 that finally had a damned chart?
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IMO, the last site I posted wasn't very good, since they didn't have any real-world benchmarks. I couldn't care less what the STR was, if I knew how many seconds it would shave off of loading a given program, for example.
 
well, TBH, I'm looking mostly for the STR to be smooth and not like what Griff posted to make sure there aren't real problems with these drives
 
Got my second SSD Core 64GB drive in today. I haven't sent in the first one for RMA as of yet. So I tried creating a RAID 0 array with it, but it didn't work. It said it failed creating the array. I have 2 seagate SATA drives in a working RAID 0 array on the same computer right now. So, the controller/motherboard should be fine.

There's another guy with the same problem on the OCZ forums with trying to create a RAID 0 array on an ICHxR controller. I've got an ICH10R, he's go an ICH9R. I am now trying to install Vista x64 SP1 on the new OCZ SSD Core drive I just got today to verify the File corruption issues I was having were not because of a Hardware issue.
 
Could anyone with a core SSD do a quick battery life comparison? I'm considering one of these for my laptop to aid battery life but, I've seen zero data on the subject.
 
Well, things ain't looking good at all. There are 2 major issues that I, and some others are having with their OCZ Core SSD Drives.

1. File Corruption in Windows XP and Vista
2. RAID 0 does not work- atleast I have not found anyone who has it working. It fails creating the array.

I've tried 3 different computers, same problems. Waiting on another SATA controller to try things out again. I hope OCZ can figure it out for us-
 
1. File Corruption in Windows XP and Vista
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For me, that's a show stopper.

I can only speak for myself, but I really appreciate the time you're taking to post your trials and tribulations with this product.

It's probably gonna save a few of us from a lot of disappointment! ;)

It's a bummer it had to be you, but a least your kind enough to give us the scoop.

Griff, This Bud's for you! :D

And if ya need something to smoke......come around the back...... ;)
 
Thanks Old Hippie-

Here's something interesting to look at:







I finally got the drives to work in Raid 0... Had to go through the Intel Matrix Manager in Windows Vista. Trying to RAID in the Intel Raid BIOS at boot, would fail everytime.

I don't understand the Huge difference in Benchmark results. I am going to try and Ghost a vista install over to the Raid setup and see what happens. That first ATTO benchmark looks extremely cool though-
 
Just copied a 4.31GB file from my Seagate Raid 0 array to my SSD Raid 0 array in 34 seconds. Is that good?
 
I have not tried any other OS than Vista myself. Others I've talked to on the OCZ forum had the problem in XP. I have not talked to anybody or seen anything about any other OS's.
 
known12345 said:
http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

Although it isnt a review, it is very informative for anyone who wants to purchase the OCZ Core series.
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Excellent Read!

I may never understand some of the "why's" or "how's", but I get the jist of it, and this about sums it up......

speedch0.jpg


L:eek::eek:K at the write access times for the OCZ SSD.

There's why your graph looks crazy!
 
With all the issues with these, I'm sticking with my VelociRaptor.

The OCZ forums are full of people having problems - and all the support people are saying you have to disable AHCI, turn off caching, use a SSD compatible OS (WTF), blah blah blah.
Fuck all that - the Mtron SSDs I have work just fine - like a hard drive but faster. The only issue I had is the shitty software RAID controllers couldn't keep up with them, but when I went to a hardware controller, they really shined.
I guess you get what you pay for.

I wonder if the similar priced Super Talent MX SSDs suffer from these problems?
 
I think I will have to agree as well.
These are interesting drives, but if they won't develop a new firmware that could fix all the problems people are reporting, soon, they will remain a to risky buy.
One good thing that will come from all of this is that other vendors will release their better drives sooner.
Velociraptor is still best bet you can have now. Especially now when the 150GB version is out.

IMO ssd will become a viable choice only when prices come down to OCZ Core levels you can take one look at the reviews and say: "that's it, it is really faster" IMO that would be at about 200MB reads and 150MB writes and way better handling of small files and simultaneous read and write operations, for a single drive.
 
i mean I think my review explains it well, but dont hold your breath for a fix... its inherent with the technology
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I'm nowhere near smart enough to know if these particular SS drives can be "fixed" with somekinda update, but from what I've read, I doubt it.

I am intelligent enough to know this....
1.) If OCZ knew about these "situational facts" when they released these products, it's definately given them a "black eye" as far as I'm concerned. Seems like they assumed the purchaser would know all the details.
2.) Ya get what ya pay for.
 
Hmmm, could be that soon we shal see a new product from them and they will just "forget" this one.
Bad OCZ. Test the products yourselves before you release them. Don't blindly believe in manufacturers mails that it really works. :D
 
8steve8 said:
i mean I think my review explains it well, but dont hold your breath for a fix... its inherent with the technology. It's just terrible for small random writes, but terribly awesome for small random reads.

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106
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Man thank god you posted your review. Before it, I was still all for the OCZ Core Series and ready to bite on SSD but your review convinced me otherwise; I should, at the very least, wait a few more weeks before biting to see how OCZ responds to the problem. Apparently SSD wasn't as far developed as I thought and ready for mainstream =(. I guess i'll wait till winter to even consider SSD. Thanks again for reviewing your drive, personally, I think its the best review for the Core series out there, and probably stay that way for some time.
 
Old Hippie said:
I'm nowhere near smart enough to know if these particular SS drives can be "fixed" with somekinda update, but from what I've read, I doubt it.

I am intelligent enough to know this....
1.) If OCZ knew about these "situational facts" when they released these products, it's definately given them a "black eye" as far as I'm concerned. Seems like they assumed the purchaser would know all the details.
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What we need to understand about SSD technology is that the drives work differently. Standard SATA/IDE drive performance and reliability features may not work properly with solid state drives.

AHCI enables multi-threaded access to a drive in the expectation that the NCQ reordering will prioritize the threads according to platter geometry. This causes problems with SSD drives because they have no real "queue" and reordering.

The same logic applies to all SSD drives. With some chipsets you won't see problems with some of these eatures enabled. This would explain why some systems have no issues running ACHI and others requires that the old school features like ACHI be shut off.

Any new technology will have it's learning curve.

Thanks
 
What kind of situations will need to do a lot of random writes?

I'm guessing that any kind of "write a file to disk" is a sequential write, starting from the beginning of the file to the end of the file... just trying to gauge the impact of such poorly performing random writes in a real-world situation.

The only things that I can think of would be databases and virtualization.
 
What we need to understand about SSD technology is that the drives work differently. Standard SATA/IDE drive performance and reliability features may not work properly with solid state drives.
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OK! I'm assuming all the drives came with instructions because you developed them and have the knowledge from the learning curve.

Because I didn't buy one of these and don't have the instructions, what are the recommendations for optimum performance?
 
andyOCZ said:
Here's the OCZ SSD guide: Configuring and setting up SSDs

It should answer most if not all of your questions.
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Not trying to dog you guys, but I have a few questions.

Why do these SSDs have issues with AHCI and HD Tach when other SSDs do not? For example, my Mtron MOBI 3000 SSDs have no issues with any of those things. Perhaps because the Core drives are MLC?

Also, the RAID performance numbers on page 2 are especially strange. First of all, the capacity of the SSD seams to affect the transfer rate. This is true for hard drives, but other SSDs of the same model line I've seen are always the exact same speed regardless of capacity.
And the RAID0 scaling is strange aswell. The read transfer rates for the 64GB increase by only 73% over a single drive. While the 128GB shows perfect scaling of a 100% increase like other SSDs.
Then if you look at write speeds the single 64GB is slightly (3 MB/s) faster than the 128GB, but for some reason in RAID0 the 128GB is 7 MB/s faster.
 
Hi AndyOCZ,

Why is the RAID performance for 2x128 GB drives better than 2x64 GB drives when individually, the single 64 GB drive is faster than the 128 GB drive. That doesn't seem to make sense...
 
I'm astonished by how fluffy hard drive reviews are, including guru3d's,

i guess thats why i started doing my own... I have a raid article in the works...

anyway.. it seems OCZ continues to dodge the issue, claiming its this or that.

My analysis is still 100% valid.
there is a ~250ms latency to do a random write.
for huge writes that's not a big deal (obviously)

the random write performance they claim is using large request size, 100MB per request in one benchmark!
 
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