OCZ SSD Support Addendum

EDITORS NOTE: Please read Solid State Drive (SSD) Benchmark Performance Testing to understand how the benchmarks used in this article should be interpreted.

Solid State Drives are not always a direct replacement to Hard Disk technology, because there are a few differences between products that make it important to properly configure your hardware for the best possible performance and stability. OCZ SSD's are not identical to other Solid State industry offerings, which is why they include a detailed guide for proper set-up on the OCZ support forum. Following their expert advice can help you avoid data write failures and delayed write data corruption errors on the OCZ SSD. Here are some important excerpts from their guide:

Known Issues

The original release of Microsoft Vista has problems with properly using SSDs that are resolved with Service Pack1. Installation of SP1 results in a substantial performance boost in synthetic benchmarks and smoother operation of the system in standard usage. Before using, please ensure that Service Pack1 (Vista32 and 64) is installed. Also, despite the fact that Vista contains generic chipset drivers, those drivers do not correctly enable any of the SATA controllers used on current motherboards, regardless of chipset manufacturer. Please make sure to install the latest chipset drivers, otherwise, especially the burst transfers will show a dramatic degradation and this will also affect sequential read and write performance.

HDTune uses fixed strides across the array to measure small block sizes. If these blocks fall on page or chip boundaries, the time delays result in atypically low "calculated" performance spot data that are not representative of the drive's real performance but an artifact stemming from inadequate testing methodology.

HDTach's fixed strides between sample points causes similar issues as those outlined in HDTune, in this case, the periodicities of the stride pattern and the flash memory address space cause some wave-like interference patterns of the benchmark results that are also measuring artifacts rather than being indicative of performance.

AHCI

the Advanced Host Controller Interface allows Hot-Plugging and Native Commands Queuing as well as multithreaded access of the drive by applications. Enabling AHCI results in conflicts between the controller and the drive that are apparent as sluggish overall system performance.

Benchmarks that actually work are those that are not geared towards quick and dirty assessment of a HDDs performance based on optimization of the test algorithms to meet the typical HDD architecture. Examples are PCMark Vantage, Winbench 99 2.0 "Drive Inspection Test" or ATTO.

This is just a very small example of the information OCZ provides consumers in their Setup and Testing Guide: Configuring and setting up SSDs. Visit the OCZ support forum for more information and the complete guide.

<< Prev - Next >>