OCZ Vertex 460 (240GB) - Dawn of a New Era?

Test Setup + Timing Tests

Test Setup

The drives will be tested on our recently revamped storage testbed. The main changes are the faster Core i5-2500K processor and an accompanying Z77 motherboard which has native Thunderbolt connectivity.

• Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
• 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7

We have also revised our benchmarks, ditching older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also including an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance.

The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
• Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

Apart from including results of some of the latest high-end drives tested in our Great High-end SSD Shootout, we are also interested to see how the new Vertex 460 compares against the older Vertex 450, and how the Vertex 460 fares against the flagship Vector 150.

The complete list of drives tested:

• OCZ Vertex 460
• OCZ Vertex 450
• OCZ Vector 150
• Samsung SSD 840 Pro
• Samsung SSD 840 EVO
• Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme

Timing Tests

New to our evaluation of SSDs is how they perform in real world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously, which includes resource intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.

The new OCZ Vertex 460 managed decent timings and predictably, it was mostly quicker than the Vertex 450 but considerably slower than the flagship Vector 150. However, in real world usage, we doubt most users would feel the difference, since the biggest margin between the fastest and slowest drives is only a second or two.