Performance over time
As with our OCZ Summit preview article, we are going to attempt to look at long term SSD performance with the Vertex in a somewhat compressed manner.
Our first HDTach run – 223 MB/s read and 199 MB/s write
Here you can see the results reported in our preview – you can clearly see that already there is some “jumping” associated with SSDs occurring half-way through the test.
After our round of tests – 222 MB/s and 136 MB/s
After our entire onslaught of tests this is what the HDTach results look like; you can see that there has been a drop in write performance even though read performance is still very good.
A full pass with HDTach results in a stable drive of 223 MB/s read and 218 MB/s write
Our “fix” for this type of performance drop is to put the drive through a “full” benchmark with HDTach that writes an entire pass across the drive. The result is a “fresh” drive with performance hitting near its theoretical maximum.
A “fresh” run of ATTO
Though HDTach did see dramatic write performance decreases with a “used” drive, is the same true for another test like ATTO? Here is our initial ATTO result screenshot…
ATTO on a “beat up drive” – very similar performance, not a lot of degradation
Follwed by a run just after a completely random IOMeter pass for about an hour on the drive. While performance did fall just a bit (look at the early results for each run) the results are much more manageable.
All of this means that our testing with long term performance on SSDs is more valid and important as we move forward. Expect some more detail and results on this phenomena in our full review.
