OCZ's high-capacity SSD 'a solid choice'

In my quest to test all of the latest high-capacity consumer solid-state disk (SSD) drives, I came upon OCZ Technology's Apex SATA II SSD and was impressed not so much with its performance -- though you will see a boost when using it -- as with its price.

OCZ describes the Apex laptop SSD series drive as a "midrange offering for system builders and mainstream computer users." It's available in 60GB, 120GB and 250GB capacities. I tested the 2.5-in., 120GB version, since drives of that capacity and larger tend to be faster when writing data than 60GB models.

You can buy the 120GB version -- the one I tested -- for US$295 at Newegg.com and the 250GB model for $675. For those of you who are bad at math, that's between $2.46 and $2.70 a gigabyte, which is pretty good for SSD. For comparison purposes, the 256GB Samsung SATA II SSD that I recently reviewed has a retail price of $500.

Using a Dell Latitude D830 laptop with a 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor running Windows XP Professional SP2, I connected the drive using an adapter in my laptop's optical drive bay. I then tested it using ATTO Technology's ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.34, and Simpli Software's HD Tach v3.0.4 benchmarking utilities. While I was able to successfully test both read and write performance with the ATTO app, HD Tach had problems properly measuring write performance. So, I only have read performance measurements from that utility.

ATTO indicated the OCZ drive had a 233MB/sec. average read speed and a 153MB/sec. average write speed -- not far from OCZ's claims of 230MB/sec. read and 160MB/sec. write speeds.

Next, I tested the drive using HD Tach. Normally, the results are similar to those reported by ATTO; in this case, they were way off. I tested and retested and got virtually the same results every time. The average read time was around 156MB/sec., the burst speed was around 230MB/sec. and random access time was an excellent 2 milliseconds. CPU utilization was a respectable 7%.

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