Question about Intel ssd vs OCZ.

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perrosky

Limp Gawd
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Aug 31, 2009
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Hello
I have a question about INTEL VS THE OCZ (SSD)

right now I have a OCz Agility 60gb working just fine in my system, I will upgrade my wife laptop with this (agility) and buy another ssd for my self I was thinking about get an 80gb INTEL G2 since everyone seems to love them and say great things about it. But then I got confuse after I red the specs of the INTEL and compare them with the AGILITY. I know there are 20mbs read speed in the intel but there is 65mbs write speed in the agility. Can you guys clear this for me so I know exactly the diference and can speak about it with my co-workers, beside If I get it I really would like to know why it's better.

-intel
Sequential Access - Read up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write up to 70MB/s
-agility
Sequential Access - Read Up to 230 MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 135 MB/s
-Vertex Turbo
Sequential Access - Read up to 240MB/s
Sequential Access - Write up to 145MB/s
 
dude, the intels have serious issues when they are writing, and reading in the very same time, their performance goes to shit. this is a very under-reported issue with those ssd's, but very true nonetheless..they do not handle real world applications as well, because once they start writing, their perfomance is crap. anandtech has some good articles on ssd's. look up the one about real world perfomrance,. and there the vertex beats the intels when it comes to heavy OS usage.
 
The read speeds are negligible. The OCZ drives are rated for higher sequential writes, which makes a difference when doing large file copies, video editing, etc. Some say programs install on the OCZ drives too, and if the program you're installing consists primarily of large files then that may be true.

Where the Intel shines is in small random writes, which is what the OS does a lot of. You can't just post the sequential read/write speeds and think that they explain everything.

Also check out these articles -- they go into good detail and you should have a better understanding of how SSDs work (and what matters, i.e. why all SSDs aren't that great) after reading them.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=27

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=22

I would read the articles from the beginning, but I linked you to benchmarks that prove sequential numbers aren't everything.
 
Computurd said:
dude, the intels have serious issues when they are writing, and reading in the very same time, their performance goes to shit. this is a very under-reported issue with those ssd's, but very true nonetheless..they do not handle real world applications as well, because once they start writing, their perfomance is crap. anandtech has some good articles on ssd's. look up the one about real world perfomrance,. and there the vertex beats the intels when it comes to heavy OS usage.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your input now I wonder why people prefers intel over OCZ:confused:.

right now there is a deal in the OCZ AGILITY 120GB that I would like to take but I want so more inputs about intel vs ocs.
 
imyourzero said:
The read speeds are negligible. The OCZ drives are rated for higher sequential writes, which makes a difference when doing large file copies, video editing, etc. Some say programs install on the OCZ drives too, and if the program you're installing consists primarily of large files then that may be true.

Where the Intel shines is in small random writes, which is what the OS does a lot of. You can't just post the sequential read/write speeds and think that they explain everything.

Also check out these articles -- they go into good detail and you should have a better understanding of how SSDs work (and what matters, i.e. why all SSDs aren't that great) after reading them.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=27

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=22

I would read the articles from the beginning, but I linked you to benchmarks that prove sequential numbers aren't everything.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your comment I can read in your sing that you have both an intel and a ocz
can you make a comment about you real experience with both ssd? and about how much faster is your intel over the ocs
 
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=8

what you are looking at is the middle comparison chart. when i talk of the intels taking a beating during writes, i am also speaking of their read performance. it also falls when the intels are under writing conditions, especially those small files we are talking about. access time also goes up.
you will not see the intels beating the vertex by that margin in anything, not even close. real world scenarios under heavy usage vertex beats them hands down. in other scenarios, intels barely beat the vertex.
 
People prefer the Intel because it dominates in random read/writes, which depending on the user, will generally be the bulk of the usage. The Anandtech articles demonstrate this pretty well.

The two main reasons to get the OCZ are to save money or if you know for some reason that you're going to be needing a lot of speed in sequential writes.

For me, the price difference didn't bother me too much and I rarely write to my SSD in large blocks. I may install something large once and then read that something 100 times.

The "heavy usage" benchmark had torrents being written to the SSD and all sorts of other write usage, something that I would never do since I typically save these large blocks of data to my spindle drives, which can easily keep up with that sort of write behavior.

So really, it depends on how you use your computer. Lots of people do mainly sequential and random reads, which is why Intel is popular.
 
those links by perosky are from months ago, they have gotten a little better at testing these drives since then:p
 
perrosky said:
Thanks for your input now I wonder why people prefers intel over OCZ:confused:.

right now there is a deal in the OCZ AGILITY 120GB that I would like to take but I want so more inputs about intel vs ocs.
Click to expand...

I haven't used the Vertex as an OS drive yet, but the Intel has been fantastic (hence why they are extremely popular here). I'm not sure what beef Computurd has against the Intel, but no one seems to have regretted using one as an OS drive. The Heavy Trace test means little in the grand scheme of things. Did you even look at what was thrown at those drives in that test? Not exactly indicative of something most users do in the real world. So what if the Vertex beats the Intel in that test? It's like you saying your Viper can out-muscle my Corvette because the Viper has a V10, when in fact the Corvette is superior in other areas.

To put things into perspective, if you want to focus on that Heavy Trace graph, look at how badly BOTH the Vertex and X25-M absolutely demolish even the mighty Velociraptor. Anand says that the Indilinx drives have improved to a point where you might as well buy one based on your size requirements rather than just looking at the numbers, since both drives are leagues ahead of mechanical drives and either one can show superiority in different tests. That's probably what I'd recommend to you. Considering you already own an Agility, I'd say you're already ahead of the game in many respects. If you are set on putting the Agility in your wife's laptop and want to try something new, go for the Intel. I, and many many others on here will tell you that you won't be disappointed. Since both drives perform extremely well, whether you'd notice enough difference to justify the additional ~$250 is another matter...everyone's expectations are different. Some people claimed to have been blown away by going from two VR's in RAID0 to a single X25-M while others have gone from a 640GB 7,200 RPM drive to an SSD and said they expected a bigger difference.
 
imyourzero said:
I haven't used the Vertex as an OS drive yet, but the Intel has been fantastic (hence why they are extremely popular here). I'm not sure what beef Computurd has against the Intel, but no one seems to have regretted using one as an OS drive. The Heavy Trace test means little in the grand scheme of things. Did you even look at what was thrown at those drives in that test? Not exactly indicative of something most users do in the real world. So what if the Vertex beats the Intel in that test? It's like you saying your Viper can out-muscle my Corvette because the Viper has a V10, when in fact the Corvette is superior in other areas.

To put things into perspective, if you want to focus on that Heavy Trace graph, look at how badly BOTH the Vertex and X25-M absolutely demolish even the mighty Velociraptor. Anand says that the Indilinx drives have improved to a point where you might as well buy one based on your size requirements rather than just looking at the numbers, since both drives are leagues ahead of mechanical drives and either one can show superiority in different tests. That's probably what I'd recommend to you. Considering you already own an Agility, I'd say you're already ahead of the game in many respects. If you are set on putting the Agility in your wife's laptop and want to try something new, go for the Intel. I, and many many others on here will tell you that you won't be disappointed. Since both drives perform extremely well, whether you'd notice enough difference to justify the additional ~$250 is another matter...everyone's expectations are different. Some people claimed to have been blown away by going from two VR's in RAID0 to a single X25-M while others have gone from a 640GB 7,200 RPM drive to an SSD and said they expected a bigger difference.
Click to expand...

Thanks I will get an intel drive (I hope the new firmaware for trims WORKS this time) .
 
perrosky said:
Thanks I will get an intel drive (I hope the new firmaware for trims WORKS this time) .
Click to expand...

You can get the Intel 160GB through newegg for $424 right now, I was thinking of getting the Agility to save some money, but deal is dead now
 
imyourzero said:
I haven't used the Vertex as an OS drive yet, but the Intel has been fantastic (hence why they are extremely popular here). I'm not sure what beef Computurd has against the Intel, but no one seems to have regretted using one as an OS drive. The Heavy Trace test means little in the grand scheme of things. Did you even look at what was thrown at those drives in that test? Not exactly indicative of something most users do in the real world. So what if the Vertex beats the Intel in that test? It's like you saying your Viper can out-muscle my Corvette because the Viper has a V10, when in fact the Corvette is superior in other areas.

To put things into perspective, if you want to focus on that Heavy Trace graph, look at how badly BOTH the Vertex and X25-M absolutely demolish even the mighty Velociraptor. Anand says that the Indilinx drives have improved to a point where you might as well buy one based on your size requirements rather than just looking at the numbers, since both drives are leagues ahead of mechanical drives and either one can show superiority in different tests. That's probably what I'd recommend to you. Considering you already own an Agility, I'd say you're already ahead of the game in many respects. If you are set on putting the Agility in your wife's laptop and want to try something new, go for the Intel. I, and many many others on here will tell you that you won't be disappointed. Since both drives perform extremely well, whether you'd notice enough difference to justify the additional ~$250 is another matter...everyone's expectations are different. Some people claimed to have been blown away by going from two VR's in RAID0 to a single X25-M while others have gone from a 640GB 7,200 RPM drive to an SSD and said they expected a bigger difference.
Click to expand...

I use my Vertex pretty similarly to the heavy trace bench...

If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
Click to expand...
 
aznx said:
I use my Vertex pretty similarly to the heavy trace bench...
Click to expand...

Obviously, different users have different usage patterns. It's pointless to take someone who is capable of doing their own research and sway them one way or another. If you truly hammer your SSD like that then you probably made the right choice in going with a Vertex. But I'd venture to say that had you chosen the Intel drive, your experience wouldn't be that much inferior.

I already said both are great drives. I took the same stance with SSDs that I took with consoles...rather than listen to the fanboys argue over whether the 360 or PS3 is better, I just bought both so I can make my own determination. :cool: If I could only afford one, then I would do my own research and buy the drive that I thought would best suit my needs, as I encourage anyone to do.
 
I agree, when it comes to real world performance, you're not going to see much difference between the Intel and the OCZ drives. That said, I chose to purchase 7 ocz drives over the past 9 months because of the value (price per GB). I have no regrets.

Jason
 
My 30GB vertexes are too small to ever consider downloading large files or torrents onto them. I suppose that's ironic. To echo a123456, I store all my large files on mechanical drives. The only time I can imagine sequential-write speeds being particularly useful on my OS SSD is for application installation.
 
What I don't understand is why would someone subject their expensive and write-limited SSDs to heavy-trace usage every day (downloading a bunch of files in particular)... I mean, SSDs don't last long as it is, why go out of the way to try to kill it? Unless, of course, that person is made of money then I guess it's not a problem lol :D
 
TehQuick said:
What I don't understand is why would someone subject their expensive and write-limited SSDs to heavy-trace usage every day (downloading a bunch of files in particular)... I mean, SSDs don't last long as it is, why go out of the way to try to kill it? Unless, of course, that person is made of money then I guess it's not a problem lol :D
Click to expand...

RMA it when it slowly starts dying? You can tell as the total drive size just starts to shrink on its own. Plus 10,000 writes per cell is a LOT.
 
aznx said:
RMA it when it slowly starts dying? You can tell as the total drive size just starts to shrink on its own. Plus 10,000 writes per cell is a LOT.
Click to expand...

And do you enjoy frequently RMAing your drives? :rolleyes: Even with 10k writes, it's still not much if you gonna download scores of gigabytes per day on such a small drive.
 
It's not the write per cell that really that bothersome. It's both the hassle of having disk space free and the lack of need. The fastest I can see most downloads going is maybe 3MB/s tops. Most people cap out even lower at ~1MB/s. So if you're downloading a lot, that might be 10-30GB/day. In a week, all the free space on the SSD is gone and it's going to be necessary to archive everything to a big spindle drive anyway.

So I just download everything to the spindle drive first and then install stuff on the SSD as needed rather than the other way around. Pretty much any modern spindle drive is going to fast enough to be able to handle the 1-3MB/s download speed. If it's stuff like streaming movies, movies only need ~8MB/s at 1080p so spindle drives are fast enough for that.
 
I place the order for my Intel lastnight I have one question somewhere here I red that if you use your ssd and a internal hardrive together that slow down the ssd performance with the OS.

I red that in another thread here.

PS. I will be using my ssd for os and some programs video ranscoding/encoding 80gb will be more than enough for me and I mostly store everything in my WHS and take it from there.
 
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TehQuick said:
And do you enjoy frequently RMAing your drives? :rolleyes: Even with 10k writes, it's still not much if you gonna download scores of gigabytes per day on such a small drive.
Click to expand...

Well I have 120gb and RMA'ing isn't that bad if I keep getting fresh drives soo...
 
10000writes per cell / 50 weeks in a year = 200 times you can repeat that cycle... I don't see the problem with durability here... (my calc. is probably way of, hahaha :D)

Youshould be way more concerned for your other dying for such extensive usage :)
 
Intel estimated that for their 80GB drive, you could write something like 10-20GB/day and the drive would last for 5-10 years. I would imagine that OCZ has similar durability.
 
I think most people here are missing the point. it is not the speed which the drives write that is important. for instance, the torrenting. the vertex is not winning by such a large margin because the write speed is faster, it is winning by so much because the intel drives go slower READING while they are also WRITING. so writing hampers its read performance.
the maximum speed of the writing to the vertex during that scenario has nothing to do with it. it is nowhere near the max. a torrenting file is SLOW stuff. it cant go faster than the speed of your internet connection, which is SLOW, no matter how fast it is.
it is a weakness of the intel controller that causes the read penalty while you are writing,
NOW if you take into consideration that a very slow stream of background writes throws off the intels performance by that much of a margin, what do you think that it does when the operating system is dropping its tons and tons of small files that it naturally does? it hampers the performance of the drive.
it is nothing pesonal or vendetta against intels that i have LOL.
it is a fact.
not saying its a bad drive, you cant go wrong with either, BUT you should take that into consideration,
 
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place the order for my Intel lastnight I have one question somewhere here I red that if you use your ssd and a internal hardrive together that slow down the ssd performance with the OS.

I red that in another thread here.

PS. I will be using my ssd for os and some programs video ranscoding/encoding 80gb will be more than enough for me and I mostly store everything in my WHS and take it from there.
 
Are these Intel drives being pimped or what? It's like a mantra or something. Intel's marketing budget is probably larger than some companies entire budget. Meanwhile all the problems are ignored. Although the truth about SSD's in general, they are still enthusiast drives. They aren't yet plug-and-play.
 
perrosky said:
place the order for my Intel lastnight I have one question somewhere here I red that if you use your ssd and a internal hardrive together that slow down the ssd performance with the OS.

I red that in another thread here.

PS. I will be using my ssd for os and some programs video ranscoding/encoding 80gb will be more than enough for me and I mostly store everything in my WHS and take it from there.
Click to expand...

I think I read what you are talking about, and no it doesn't affect the OS's performance on the ssd. But you will notice a delay when calling up something on the mechanical drive compared to the ssd due to slower access times and increased latency. As for everything on the ssd, nothing will be affected.
 
Computurd said:
I think most people here are missing the point. it is not the speed which the drives write that is important. for instance, the torrenting. the vertex is not winning by such a large margin because the write speed is faster, it is winning by so much because the intel drives go slower READING while they are also WRITING. so writing hampers its read performance.
the maximum speed of the writing to the vertex during that scenario has nothing to do with it. it is nowhere near the max. a torrenting file is SLOW stuff. it cant go faster than the speed of your internet connection, which is SLOW, no matter how fast it is.
it is a weakness of the intel controller that causes the read penalty while you are writing,
NOW if you take into consideration that a very slow stream of background writes throws off the intels performance by that much of a margin, what do you think that it does when the operating system is dropping its tons and tons of small files that it naturally does? it hampers the performance of the drive.
it is nothing pesonal or vendetta against intels that i have LOL.
it is a fact.
not saying its a bad drive, you cant go wrong with either, BUT you should take that into consideration,
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone in this thread is making the statement, "The Intel drive is better than the OCZ drive 100% of the time." The buyer looks at whatever usage patterns that are going to be common for his or her personal use. If the buyer is closer to the "heavy trace" benchmark, then obviously the OCZ is the better choice. But if the buyer's behavior is closer to the "light trace" or the "gaming trace" benchmark, then obviously, money aside, the Intel is a better choice. You did notice that once in a while, the Intel drive does pull ahead for a couple of the benchmarks, right? From the article that you linked, "The light trace is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes." So the light trace benchmarks do include read and write performance at the same time.

So, yeah, for you in particular, since you seem to imply your usage patterns follow the heavy trace more, then the OCZ is a better choice. For the OP, it may be different or he might be a heavy trace type user also.

I'd like to think that most buyers who are paying 2-3+ dollars per GB are intelligent enough to analyze their own usage patterns and pick an appropriate drive based on that rather than blindly going with one of the other.

Just to add, Anand makes a solid point in his conclusion. The real-world performance on all the latest drives is pretty close. The size of the drive and the price points are strong considerations to take into account. If there's a big sale on an OCZ drive or an Intel drive, that might tip the balance one way or the other. If your budget only allows for 120GB, then the OCZ is a fine choice. If your budget is 500+, then the extra 40GB can be nice also. The price points for the different brands are actually pretty far apart. Other factors to consider include things like availability. The Intel drive has been notoriously difficult to find while the OCZ drives are available at numerous retailers.

vista_blista said:
Are these Intel drives being pimped or what? It's like a mantra or something. Intel's marketing budget is probably larger than some companies entire budget. Meanwhile all the problems are ignored. Although the truth about SSD's in general, they are still enthusiast drives. They aren't yet plug-and-play.
Click to expand...

Of course, SSDs are enthusiast drives. You're not going to put one in a computer for your parents who just surf the web. It's for users who want the fastest reasonable speed for storage. Always will be a niche while it's $/GB is so much higher than regular drives.

And SSDs not being plug and play? You have a link for that? Every SSD and hard drive that I've encountered in the last few years has worked out of the box so far, but then again I'm not dealing with older computers that might be using things like Windows 2000. It might not be compatible with those machines.
 
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Yeah I'm all over this too since my Kingston 40gb SSd never showed up and Kingston has no idea when they will be making more, if ever.

I can go to Compusa and pick up the OCZ agility tomorrow for $220, but it seems stupid not to get 20 gig more for $35 more for the OEM Intel x25.
 
a123456 said:
You're not going to put one in a computer for your parents who just surf the web. It's for users who want the fastest reasonable speed for storage. Always will be a niche while it's $/GB is so much higher than regular drives.
Click to expand...

I do actually. My parents don't need any space at all so 80gb is 60gb more than they need. Ok so they use Word a bit, but they love that it opens faster than they can sneeze and the entire machine now has zero moving parts so it's dead silent.
 
Just got home and guess what? my Intel ssd was there!

It is a retail version.
PRODUCT CODE: SSDSA2MH080G2R5
PACK DATE:l 11/03/09

I'm gonna download the latest firmware right now to burn it into a dvd and flash it. And then install W7 64bit

any advice?????
 
I just recive my new ssd try update to the new firmware no problems. install w7 professional 64bit and when ask me for my WINDOWS KEY it says the key it's not valid. But I have installed windows like 3 times already with this key..... plz help

PS. I have re installed windows in the same machine.
 
Did you activate any previous instances of Win7? How many activations does your license grant you? Did you try calling MS support? Hope you get the OS installed.
 
bitbum said:
Did you activate any previous instances of Win7? How many activations does your license grant you? Did you try calling MS support? Hope you get the OS installed.
Click to expand...

i dont think retail keys (it is retail right?) have an activation limit. i activated my copy of vista ultimate at least 10-15 times because of formats and never had an issue. but i do think the limitation with the key is that only one activated machine may be online at once, so if the key is used on two computers at once that may be the problem. but again, this is with vista, not 7, so microsoft might have changed it.
 
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