Richard Vanderhurst

OCZ Vertex EX OCZSSD2-1VTXEX120G 120GB SATA II SLC Internal Solid state disk

There are few products that grab fan attention like SSDs have.

OCZ has made a well-deserved hum round the industry since they launched their Core II, peak, and Zenith multi-layer cell SSD products for retail shoppers.

Now they’ve gone a step further, and created a SLC SSD for the demanding enterprise server segment. Baseline Reviews welcomes the OCZ Apex EX SSD OCZSSD2-1VTXEX120G into the ranks, and our bandwidth performance tests compare the Vertex EX to many other SSDs occupying the top of the range market. Performance fans have been keeping notes on Solid State Drive technology for some time now. SSD products aren’t main line, not yet, but that day isn’t extremely far off anymore.

Lower power consumption and heat output are benefits of the technology, but also they are the least galvanizing benefits any Solid State Drive can supply. The genuine payoff is a nearly-instant reply time and awesome high-performance throughput speeds. OCZ may not have made the Solid State Drive, but they’ve done more to bring SSD technology mainstream than any other company in the complete industry. Once SSDs could ultimately outperform their HDD opposite number, the discussion became all about price and capacity. The OCZ Core Series helped offer reasonable Solid State Drive technology to the masses, but capacity and stuttering became new issues.

Adding up to 64MB of Elpida DRAM to the buffer has permanently solved stuttering issues, making raw performance the last bottleneck. An Indilinx ‘Barefoot’ internal controller commands the bank of Samsung K9HCG08U1M DRAM modules, permitting the OCZ Zenith Series SSD to supply a galvanizing capacity with unmatched performance.

Baseline Reviews tests the reaction time and bandwidth performance for the Vertex EX SLC SSD against over 2 dozen other products in this article. Baseline Reviews latterly made public an article which details Solid State Drive ( SSD ) Baseline Performance Testing. The analysis and consultation that went into producing that article modified how we now test SSD products. Our prior perceptions of this technology were lost on one special difference : the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target.

Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other strategy of total-capacity testing, our prior performance results were coarse guesses at best. It’s critically vital to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in an equivalent fashion.

Artificial baseline tools such as HD Tach and ATTO Disk Baseline are useful indicators, but shouldn’t be considered the final determining factor. That factor should be measured in precise user experience of real-world applications. Baseline Reviews includes both bandwidth baselines and application speed tests to present a definitive measurement of product performance. Entering the memory market in Aug two thousand, OCZ Technology was built round the doggedness to make the best high speed DDR and RDRAM. OCZ was set up by fans, for fans, and their dedication to the end-user hasn’t digressed. OCZ Technology has been a trailblazer in numerous areas.

We were the 1st manufacturer to make Twin Channel optimized memory available to the general public, which originally made use of nVidia’s Twinbank or Twin DDR design, found in their nForce chipset.

We have now taken that technology and tailored it for the Canterwood, and Granite Bay chipset’s. OCZ developed and was first to implement ULN technology, that has been a critical part in the producing process for a period of time. We at OCZ conscientiously work to enhance communication with CPU and motherboard chipset makers before the release of their products. Only in this way are we able to tune the memory’s SPD settings, guaranteeing a synergistic relationship between the memory module, memory controller, and microprocessor. In today’s rapidly developing semiconductor industry, such communication isn’t simply research, but an obligatory element of the producing process.

Windows Vista and DirectX ten are, barring further delays, a trifling 5 months away, and with them will come next-gen Computer games, for example Crysis. Based on previews of Crysis we saw at the year’s E3, if you’ve got the hardware to run it, you’ll be treated to a heretofore unseen level of graphical realism. ATI’s new Radeon X1950 XTX, expounded today, will not deliver that experience. It is a DirectX nine card, that means it can only make the best of games from this generation. Spotting this fact, ATI has priced the new card at an assertive $450. If this card had come out a year back, it could have been priced between $500 and $600, since it is the fastest single-chip card on the market.

The largest change it brings to the Radeon X1000 family is GDDR-4 memory. It should be the 1st 3D card to market with GDDR-4 when it hits the streets on Sep fourteen. It is also the source of the major clock speed ticks to this card. At 650MHz, the chip’s clock speed remains the same as the Radeon X1900 XTX’s, but the memory now runs at a full 2GHz, up from its predecessor’s 1.2GHz. ATI has held a slight edge in DirectX games ( most titles ), and Nvidia has won on OpenGL-based titles ( Doom three, Quake four, Prey ), but neither was ahead enough to actually claim outright dominance. And we cannot say that ATI blows Nvidia out of the water now, but we do have to hand it the final edge for its gains on Quake four and, by extension, OpenGL.

Fourteen to go with the stand-alone model, but we do not endorse it. To be fair, we do not advocate buying any new multicard or multichip setup now, so Nvidia’s SLI is out, too. The arrival of the next-gen cards is just too near to spend that sort of cash now.

Eventually , when ATI told us that it was showcasing the Radeon X1950, the CrossFire Edition, and its other new cards today, but wasn’t selling them till Sept. Fourteen, we were reminded of the distressing launch of the Radeon X1000 series, in which ATI did not communicate the heavy delay between the press coverage and the availability. We were not going to fall for that again, so we asked ATI’s Will Wallis to clarify why this isn’t another paper launch. The issue is that there were similar conferences that had taken place in Europe, and 3 print publications are now locked and loaded to run stories on the X1950 cards on August twenty-five, basically breaking the NDA if we move it to the fourteen.

With a focus more on use instead of additional features, the Fujitsu HandyDrive model fits the mold for an off-the-cuff user who simply wishes more cupboard space than an internal disk can hold. The Fujitsu HandyDrive should consider itself fortunate to attain fast baselines as it actually could not get by on looks alone. Fujitsu’s tasteless design and unlucky absence of color decisions just can’t compare with definitely fascinating HDDs on the market, like the Go beyond StoreJet 25f. Bizarrely enough, the HandyDrive closely seems like the Seagate FreeAgent Go in size and shape with its downturned curve toward the base. The device is the average size for an external drive, measuring 5.6 inches long, 3.2 inches wide, and 0.87 in.deep.

At the same time, we do not counsel purposely abusing it to check this speculation.

The Fujitsu HandyDrive transferred our 10GB info backwards and forwards virtually as fast as the Go beyond StoreJet 25F. The read times are nearly matching at 27.94MB / s for Fujitsu and 27.52 for Go beyond and the write times differ only by about 2MB, as you can see in the chart below. You are not going to note an extreme difference with such a little discrepancy between those 2, so that the final shopping call is a query of how much you put a value on Go beyond’s little stature and good looks. If you are not prepared to pay the additional four cents per gb., then you will be very happy with the basic Fujitsu HandyDrive.