Benchmarks

Windows Vista 64-bit was installed on the Western Digital 150Gb Raptor, we had a chance to run through a quick HD Tune 3.10, testing both access times and throughput of the file system, so there’s definitely some caching action going on here.



At smaller chunk size the SSD are known for less than stellar performance, Windows works with ~4k chunk files, here we see ~100mb/s read/write performance which is quite good (understatement). As soon as the chunk size goes up you see the advantage of the PCI Express interface, scaling upwards to 1400mb/s read and 1100mb/s write speeds. Do note that these are not sustained write speeds, rather buffered/cached read and write operations which your OS and applications do a lot of.

Sisoft Sandra File system test takes a more real-world approach and its integrated database allows us to compare the results to some other popular storage solutions as the Gigabyte iRAM, a RAID-0 array of 15000rpm SCSI drives and 4xRAID-0 of the very popular WD Raptor 36Gb.



Access times with the Z-Drive are instant, same as the Gigabyte I-Ram… but look at that performance index rating of 550mb/s… just wow!

Last up was PCMark Vantage HDD testing suite which takes up 20 minutes to complete and comes up with results much higher than any SSD/I-RAM/HDD array encountered yet: total score for HDD section only 43000+



OCZ listed “up to 4Tb” by the end of the year, this would surpass any other single device (not single disk) on the market, but at what price? The 1Tb version will cost more than $1500, so it’s definitely high end. You could build your own 4 drive array with some ultra fast 32Gb X25-E Intel SSDs, the cost would be $2400+ for a 256Gb drive…

We’re definitely looking forward to see this product go retail and how the competition will react. What is sure is that OCZ has upped the ante with the Z-Drive!