Power Consumption, Sound Levels and Conclusions
Because we are actually taking power numbers at the wall, encompassing the entire test system and not singling out the hard drive, our power numbers for in the 100s rather than the single digits. To help showcase the differences between the hard drives a bit more, I decided to change the scale slightly and report the “watts over 90” that we recorded in each instance. So, for example, on the WD VelociRaptor drive, with wattage listed as 13.6w at idle, that is in fact indicating total system wattage of 103.6W at idle (90W + 13.6W).
Obviously both the OCZ 64GB SSD and WD Scorpio 250GB drive use much less power than the full sized 3.5″ drives for desktop machines. The larger drives use larger platters that spin at faster rates and that obviously requires more power to spin. The solid state drive in fact uses a couple of watts less during seek actions than the WD Scorpio drive and it’s for this reason that many high-end thin and light notebooks are going with SSDs.
Noise Levels
I didn’t get a chance to put sound level meter numbers to all the hard drives in our test, but let it be known: the OCZ 64GB SSD is essentially silent at all times. It has no spinning parts and works just like system memory or the memory card in your camera; when’s the last time you heard them power on?
Obviously both the OCZ 64GB SSD and WD Scorpio 250GB drive use much less power than the full sized 3.5″ drives for desktop machines. The larger drives use larger platters that spin at faster rates and that obviously requires more power to spin. The solid state drive in fact uses a couple of watts less during seek actions than the WD Scorpio drive and it’s for this reason that many high-end thin and light notebooks are going with SSDs.
Noise Levels
I didn’t get a chance to put sound level meter numbers to all the hard drives in our test, but let it be known: the OCZ 64GB SSD is essentially silent at all times. It has no spinning parts and works just like system memory or the memory card in your camera; when’s the last time you heard them power on?
Performance
I knew coming into this review that the solid state drives were going to differ greatly from standard hard drives in terms of performance but I didn’t know exactly how much and in which ways. The very obvious strong spot for the OCZ 64GB SSD is the pure speed it demonstrated in random access times; with a time of 0.2 ms compared to the 6.9 ms of our fastest platter-based hard drive the OCZ SSD is 345x faster in get that single bit of data. This can obviously incredible beneficial to applications that utilize a HUGE amount of random reads as long as those reads are for very small bits of data.
Where the performance of the OCZ 64GB SSD falters is in the sustained transfer rates. The read speed of the disk was pretty good at 54 MB/s though the write speed was less than half that at 26 MB/s or so. These scores aren’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things but they are a letdown when compared to the huge benefits that SSDs are seeing in random access. In some of our application tests these transfer rates were more inhibitive than others – for example in our PCMark Vantage tests the Windows Video Maker and Windows Media Center applications ran slower on the OCZ SSD than they did on any of the platter-based hard drives. However, PCMark Vantage gave the SSD big advantages in the application loading and Vista Startup results.
In the end, the performance of the OCZ 64GB SSD could definitely be improved (say with a SATA-II controller) but should be good enough in ALL areas to allow users that need the incredibly fast random access times to justify it.
Capacity Limits
Obviously one big drawback for the OCZ 64GB SSD, and all currently available solid state drives, is the capacity limits imposed by the law of finances. The OCZ 64GB model is one of the largest SSDs in retail availability though there is one out that has 128GB of storage. Obviously a user that has 32GB or 64GB SSD is going to need SOMETHING else for mass storage and that would come in the form of a platter-based hard drive as large as 1TB.
Solid state media will eventually be able to take over the larger capacity markets and may even outpace the standard hard drive market in the coming years. We have seen SSDs come from 4GB and below to 128GB in the passing of just 24 months or so and even though the prices are definitely still high, they have actually come down quite a bit. 64GB may be enough for some notebook users that don’t need to take everything with them but consumers will definitely need this OCZ 64GB SSD in combination with another hard drive if they decide to take the plunge.
Potential Usage Models
Obviously the use of a 64GB solid state drive like this isn’t going to be for everyone or even for most situations. Obviously one of the best uses for these drives is in notebook computers were hard drives are usually much slower (ala the Scorpio drive from Western Digital) and run at much lower rotation rates than desktop drives (usually 2.5″ drives will spin at 4200 or 5400 RPM versus the 7200 or 10,000 RPM of desktop drives). The mobile market will benefit the speed increase, the lower power consumption, basically noiseless operation and won’t be hurt as much by the lack of large of amounts of storage that users really NEED on the desktop but may not on their laptop.
For the desktop consumer, the OCZ 64GB SSD is much harder sell – the drive isn’t as fast as even moderately priced and positioned platter hard drives for larger reads and writes even though the seek speed is damn impressive. And 64GB is rather small even for just an OS drive – I know many people in our Storage Forum have discussed 150GB being all they needed so THEY might be comfortable with a 64GB primary drive but I still need a bit more.
Pricing and Availability
Now for the real kicker in all of this: even though I mentioned that the price on solid state drives have come down a lot since their first release to the consumer market, this OCZ 64GB SSD SATA-I drive will still cost you a grand. Yep, $1099 is the lowest price you’ll find the 64GB model selling for. The good news is that the SATA-II version is already available as of this writing and is selling for the same price. We’ll definitely have one of these in for testing VERY soon!
Even so, obviously not many people are going to be spending $1000 on a hard drive; let alone one that is only 64GB in size no matter HOW fast it is or claims to be. This is definitely a part for the true PC enthusiast that demands the absolute best.
UPDATE: The 64GB OCZ SSD SATA-II is at Newegg.com for $1049 as of this writing…
Final Thoughts
Overall, OCZ’s first foray into the world of solid state drives is actually pretty good, if not as good as we had hoped. The incredibly fast seek times as well as the low power draw and noiseless operation definitely add up to something that is worth considering but the slow sustained and average transfer rates really bring the whole package down a notch. We will have an updated SATA-II version of this drive in very soon and will get it up on the test bench ASAP to post another comparison here that we hope will really blow away the first SSD’s results.
More coming soon!
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