OCZ Vertex 2 120GB Solid State Drive Review

System Overview & Testing Procedures
The system we are going to be installing the C300 in is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, Radeon 4870 X2 video card, 1TB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Thermaltake EVO_Blue power supply, all inside the Thermaltake Armor A90 case.

info1

Before we get into testing let’s open CrystalDiskInfo and take a look. As you can see the drive is running at SATA 3Gbps and supports S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ, and most importantly TRIM.

info

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

– HDTune Pro (download)
– Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
– ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
– CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
– AS SSD Benchmark (download)

We also made these optimization changes…

– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

For comparison we will be testing the Vertex 2 against these 2 other drives…

– Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (Review)
– Corsair Force Series F100 100GB (Review)

The Corsair Force F100 is running the same SandForce SF-1200 chip as the Vertex 2. We will be comparing the drive to the RealSSD C300 as well, but the C300 runs on SATA 6G so it is not a fair comparison, but we included it because it is the fastest drive we have tested to date.

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