OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

OCZ Technology advertises the Vertex 3 SSDs as being compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Mac OS X. There is no Linux love in their support advertisements, but it works fine anyhow, as do most data storage devices. The SSD was being tested under an Ubuntu 11.10 development snapshot with the Linux 3.0 kernel and using an EXT4 file-system.

The system used for benchmarking had a Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard, which provides native Serial ATA 3.0 ports. This Cougar Point motherboard had an Intel Core i5 2500K CPU, 4GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics, and a selection of HDD/SSDs were tested. In particular, for comparison was a Western Digital WD5000AAKX-0 500GB, OCZ Solid 64GB, OCZ Agility 128GB, OCZ Vertex 60GB, and OCZ Vertex 3 240GB. The Western Digital WD5000AAKX-0 is a Serial ATA 3.0 hard drive, with the other SSDs being compliant with the SATA 2.0 specification. The WD5000AAKX-0 has a native SATA 6GB/s interface, 16MB of cache, and operates at 7200RPM.

Atop this Intel Sandy Bridge system with an Ubuntu 11.10 installation / Linux 3.0 kernel a number of Linux desktop benchmarks were run using the Phoronix Test Suite. All disks were formatted to an EXT4 file-system.