Intel 320 Series vs. OCZ Vertex 2 (vs. Apple)

Actually this post should be called NO OCZ NO or something like that…

I already wrote about the OCZ Vertex 2 E once or twice with somewhat mixed feelings.
Now after 6 months with the first one, and 3 months with the second one, I wouldn’t recommend buying any of these again. Well, at least not if you’re using Apple.

60Gb OCZ Vertex 2 E in my Mac Mini (6 Months old):

• huge loss in performance (maybe due to the lack of TRIM in OSX?)
• sometimes the mini won’t fall asleep or just wakes up again

120Gb OCZ Vertex 2 E in my MacBook Pro (10 weeks old):

• performance is still good
• suspend2disk doesn’t work. Known bug. OSX will crash. OCZ promised to fix it – but didn’t!
• sleep and direct wake-up results in the SSD not being recognized for ~10 minutes!!! No booting possible!

Most of the issues with OCZ’s SSDs seem to be sleep/hibernate related and from what I’ve heard do mostly affect Apple products, but their crappy support prevents me from buying any of their products again. They promised to release a firmware upgrade which fixes suspend2disk, but they did not. They closed the thread in their forums and don’t even respond to requests via eMail. But hey! At least they release the OCZ Vertex 3 – so you possibly get all these bugs fixed for just 180€!

All these issues and their non-responding support made me replace the Vertex with the new Intel 320 Series SSD. They might be slower according to their specs, but performance isn’t everything

Which leads me to the next part of this post…

The Intel 320 120Gb SSD! I installed this one in my MacBook Pro last week and what shall I say? After one week everything is great. I’m not talking about pure performance. I didn’t NOTE any difference in real life performance, but just in case… here is a simple sequential performance check:

OCZ Vertex 2 E 120Gb:

homer:~ $ dd if=/dev/zero of=10000M.img bs=1024 count=10000000
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 82.815477 secs (123648385 bytes/sec)
homer:~ $ dd if=10000M.img of=/dev/null
20000000+0 records in
20000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 47.731347 secs (214534068 bytes/sec)

Intel 320 Series 120Gb:

homer:~ mrkofee$ dd if=/dev/zero of=10000M.img bs=1024 count=10000000
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 108.879939 secs (94048546 bytes/sec)
homer:~ mrkofee$ dd if=file.img of=/dev/null
20000000+0 records in
20000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 47.695655 secs (214694610 bytes/sec)

The Intel is a tad slower in pure sequential write performance, which is a bit disappointing considering it’s one generation newer than the Vertex 2… But, now to the important stuff

• Suspend2Disk: works
• Closing and directly opening the MBP: works
• Support: Well… it’s Intel. I don’t expect it to be any better than OCZ’s.
• The good feeling of reliability: works

I haven’t received any negative reports from friends about the Intel X25-M  (the 320 Series predecessor) nor have I found much on the Interwebs… so I’m much happier with the Intel now…

Mac Mini and the OCZ Vertex 2

Last week I upgraded my early 2009 Mac Mini (Core2Duo, 8Gb RAM, 320Gb 7200rpm HDD) with an SSD. I do heavy multitasking, and my HDD was just slowing me down. I did some research and brought it down to the Intel X-25G2 and the OCZ Vertex 2 (A SandForce based SSD, which works quite different than the Intel SSD). I went with the OCZ Vertex 2 E 60Gb… I am no expert in this SSD stuff, but what I’ve figured out so far is that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) doesn’t support TRIM, which should not be a big problem with current SSDs under Mac OS X from what I’ve read and noticed so far.

The installation itself was as “easy” as I described earlier.

I then booted from the Snow Leopard installation DVD, selected Restore from Time Machine Backup and 30min later my system was back up. As a side note: You can restore from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD (as long as your data fits with no problems of course), but you will need to format the SSD using Disk Utility first. Otherwise the Restore Wizard will tell you, that your Backup doesn’t fit! It does format it later on again…

(I did re-install yesterday because of some weird issues with graphics performance, but that had nothing to do with the SSD or restore process. I had annoying lags when scrolling in Lightroom or Firefox for example since the Graphics Driver update for Snow Leopard a few months ago…)

Everything works smooth and well. System boot has decreased from 1min 15s to about 30s, OpenOffice now starts in 2s instead of 20s, Lightroom switches quickly between it’s modules… My average write speed is around 90MB/s, average read speed is around 150MB/s. Both for one stream. Should be much higher with multiple streams combined. But what’s more important is the very low access time.

After about one week the Vertex 2 looks like a good teammate for the Mini.

P.S. it looks like Sunday is a good day for scheduling my posts from now on