UPDATE: Added latest scores for Firmware 1199. Check out the xbench scores
Woo hoo ! Just got my Vertex 120GB yesterday.
Inside is a plain black box. Looks like OCZ is learning from Apple.
Kinda reminds me of the iPhone packaging.
The drive itself:
This replaces the current WD Scorpio Blue 320GB in my Macbook 2.0 GHz
Installing the Vertex couldn't be easier, but one has to use the 4 Torx screws so that the drive fits into the bay
And that's what it looks like ... fitting snugly inside. I think I like the sleek black
Anyways, enough of pics. Onto install notes, benchmarks and impressions.
I partitioned the drive in Apple's DiskUtility. And installed OS X 10.5.5 and then updated with the 10.5.6 combo update. I then installed Office 2008 and VMWare Fusion. If you are concerned with alignment, don't be ... at least under OS X. That is because Apple's utilities do alignment on 4K (4096) byte boundaries. It's not perfect but it is better than nothing. If you figure out how to do the alignment yourself and still keep the GUID partition table with the protective MBR and 200MB EFI partition - please post it so that we can experiment with it. In the meantime let's look at the partition table. Running " sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0 " in Terminal gives us the following output:
[size=-1]
[/SIZE]
Let's look at our Windows 7 partition (it's the one marked as HPFS/QNX/AUX above). It starts at offset 191252480 which is actually 191252480 *512 = 97921269760 bytes. Is this aligned ? Well 97921269760 / 4096 = 23906560. Which is a nice round number. So far so good ! The other partitions are aligned to 4K boundaries as well. So, not perfect, but not bad either
Ran a few benchmarks and used the drive and from what I can tell ... it is very snappy! OS X 10.5.5 took around 18 minutes to install. Office 2008 installed in 5 min 13 seconds. I dont have equivalent figures for the HDD, but I know that it wasnt 18 minutes for installing OS X on my WD Scorpio Blue
Here is a screen shot of the drive in System Profiler
It shows 00.PT1 as the firmware revision. When OCZ comes out with their new firmware, I am going to have to backup this drive somehow. And the Win 7 partition as well. Although to be honest, I could just re-install Win7. Let's get the mandatory Xbench figures out of the way, then I'll talk about real world usage.
Here is the Xbench 1.3 disk test for my WD320GB Blue. It's a 5400 rpm drive but it is quite fast. The Xbench composite result for the WD320GB is 22.95
Now let's look at SSD figures. As you expect, they will be higher. The composite score is 221.14. That's massive a increase !
Update: Here are XBench figures for FW1199 (the latest firmware that increases sequential writes by up to 25%)
The Disktest score went from 221.14 to 236.37. The 4K sequential writes went from 134.65 MB/sec to 167.55 MB/sec, an increase of 32.9 MB/sec !
So ... Xbench tells us the drive is fast. But what does it mean in real life ? Well, the laptop feels noticeably faster - whether it is installing software or doing daily work. Installing the OS X 10.5.6 combo update tok 2 mins 58 seconds! And the biggest difference was when starting up programs. As everyone knows, the first time you start up programs, after a boot, they are annoyingly slow. After that, OS X's file cache kicks in and subsequent starts are quite fast. Let's look at what the Vertex can do for us ...
Wow ! The laptop feels snappy with the SSD. With the HDD, Entourage used to keep bouncing in the dock like a dreary beachball. The SSD makes it bounce once, twice and presto ... it is ready for use. But what about the subsequent runs ? Surely the OSX file cache is good and there isnt much improvement the SSD can hope to bring ...
So the SSD does manage to open the apps faster even on subsequent runs.
I measured OS X startup with the SSD and HDD. There was one bootable Win7 partition, I timed the duration taken from press of the power button to the desktop appearing.
Granted I let the Macbook sleep most of the time and flip the lid and work - but the SSD performance for startup is amazing ! But it's not just limited to startups, shutdowns also benefit. The Macbook usually takes anywhere from 12 to 20 seconds for a normal shutdown. With the SSD, I never see shutdowns take more than 7 seconds, with the average shutdown being 3 to 5 seconds.
One thing often overlooked by people is that the solid state hard disk is well ... solid state ! It means no vibrations, no humming, no chittering, just silence. I honestly thought the WD 320GB was silent because it was a 5400 rpm model. I didnt use a 7200 rpm disk because it vibrated and I could feel the vibrations through the palmrest. But installing the SSD was a pleasant surprise. Pure silence ! (well except for the almost inaudible whoosh of the fan). Switching back to the HDD immediately brought back the vibrations and the chittering sound that was now becoming faintly annoying. I think I'm a SSD zealot now, as far as laptops are concerned
Oh the other good thing with this drive is that BootCamp works. Yes, that's right. No problems with Bootcamp, at least on my MacBook Unibody. I installed Windows 7 x64 beta (and Vmware Fusion 2.0 was already installed on OSX). It took 19 minutes to install Win 7 - that is seriously fast. So how does Win 7 compare in terms of performance benefits ? I timed Win 7 startup from time of pressing enter when choosing the Win 7 disk in the option menu to getting the desktop on screen
This drive is fast. But the numbers above dont tell you the whole story. When using a SSD, do you know how annoying it is that the desktop appears and you still cannot click on anything ? Because the drive is churning away in the background and you dont get foreground control ? With the SSD, the difference is night and day. The system is super responsive. When the desktop appears, you get control and you can click on items. That is a HUGE plus point. It makes my 2.0 GHz laptop act like a 2.66 GHz MBP. I'm happy Starting virtual machines is faster too, but not significantly so. As always, YMMV
Here's a WinSAT screenie, with the Disk assessement score showing as 6.7
And finally ATTO running in Win7. Remember ATTO gives funny results when run on the system drive.
After torturing the drive with a few installs and what not, I ran ATTO again ...
It looks like write performance has gone down from 110 Mb/sec to 83 Mb/sec but even after further installs and usage, this value was stable.
OCZ is coming out with a new revision of the firmware that will boost sequential writes by 25% so I plan on installing this and re-testing the drive. I plan to bench mySQL/PostgresQL and SQLite. And Xcode/gcc (time a project build etc). And I will keep an eye out for stuttering (have not seen any so far). I think this is a great drive, now I just need to save up for the 250GB variant
Woo hoo ! Just got my Vertex 120GB yesterday.
Inside is a plain black box. Looks like OCZ is learning from Apple.
Kinda reminds me of the iPhone packaging.
The drive itself:
This replaces the current WD Scorpio Blue 320GB in my Macbook 2.0 GHz
Installing the Vertex couldn't be easier, but one has to use the 4 Torx screws so that the drive fits into the bay
And that's what it looks like ... fitting snugly inside. I think I like the sleek black
Anyways, enough of pics. Onto install notes, benchmarks and impressions.
I partitioned the drive in Apple's DiskUtility. And installed OS X 10.5.5 and then updated with the 10.5.6 combo update. I then installed Office 2008 and VMWare Fusion. If you are concerned with alignment, don't be ... at least under OS X. That is because Apple's utilities do alignment on 4K (4096) byte boundaries. It's not perfect but it is better than nothing. If you figure out how to do the alignment yourself and still keep the GUID partition table with the protective MBR and 200MB EFI partition - please post it so that we can experiment with it. In the meantime let's look at the partition table. Running " sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0 " in Terminal gives us the following output:
[size=-1]
Code:
macbook:~ admin$ sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0
Disk: /dev/rdisk0 geometry: 15873/255/63 [255013680 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>
2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 190578688] HFS+
*3: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 191252480 - 63760384] HPFS/QNX/AUX
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unusedLet's look at our Windows 7 partition (it's the one marked as HPFS/QNX/AUX above). It starts at offset 191252480 which is actually 191252480 *512 = 97921269760 bytes. Is this aligned ? Well 97921269760 / 4096 = 23906560. Which is a nice round number. So far so good ! The other partitions are aligned to 4K boundaries as well. So, not perfect, but not bad either
Ran a few benchmarks and used the drive and from what I can tell ... it is very snappy! OS X 10.5.5 took around 18 minutes to install. Office 2008 installed in 5 min 13 seconds. I dont have equivalent figures for the HDD, but I know that it wasnt 18 minutes for installing OS X on my WD Scorpio Blue
Here is a screen shot of the drive in System Profiler
Here is the Xbench 1.3 disk test for my WD320GB Blue. It's a 5400 rpm drive but it is quite fast. The Xbench composite result for the WD320GB is 22.95
Code:
Sequential 23.73
Uncached Write 47.78 29.34 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 23.08 13.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 14.55 4.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 28.13 14.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Code:
Random 22.23
Uncached Write 9.22 0.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 45.48 14.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 44.88 0.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 36.79 6.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]Now let's look at SSD figures. As you expect, they will be higher. The composite score is 221.14. That's massive a increase !
Code:
Sequential 181.31
Uncached Write 219.31 134.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 179.43 101.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 106.07 31.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 399.79 200.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Code:
Random 283.40
Uncached Write 107.79 11.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 330.55 105.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1650.71 11.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 829.64 153.95 MB/sec [256K blocks]Update: Here are XBench figures for FW1199 (the latest firmware that increases sequential writes by up to 25%)
Code:
Sequential 190.84
Uncached Write 272.89 167.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 191.13 108.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 104.57 30.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 399.88 200.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Code:
Random 310.43
Uncached Write 120.68 12.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 348.66 111.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1884.89 13.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 833.25 154.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]The Disktest score went from 221.14 to 236.37. The 4K sequential writes went from 134.65 MB/sec to 167.55 MB/sec, an increase of 32.9 MB/sec !
So ... Xbench tells us the drive is fast. But what does it mean in real life ? Well, the laptop feels noticeably faster - whether it is installing software or doing daily work. Installing the OS X 10.5.6 combo update tok 2 mins 58 seconds! And the biggest difference was when starting up programs. As everyone knows, the first time you start up programs, after a boot, they are annoyingly slow. After that, OS X's file cache kicks in and subsequent starts are quite fast. Let's look at what the Vertex can do for us ...
Code:
[B]1st run (HDD)[/B] [B]1st run (SSD)[/B]
Entourage 18.6 sec 5 sec
Excel 5.1 sec 2.2 sec
Word 8.5 sec 2.1 sec
Powerpoint 4.9 sec 3.5 secWow ! The laptop feels snappy with the SSD. With the HDD, Entourage used to keep bouncing in the dock like a dreary beachball. The SSD makes it bounce once, twice and presto ... it is ready for use. But what about the subsequent runs ? Surely the OSX file cache is good and there isnt much improvement the SSD can hope to bring ...
Code:
[B]2nd+ run(HDD)[/B] [B]2nd+ run(SSD)[/B]
Entourage 3.6 sec 2.5 sec
Excel 2.0 sec 1.8 sec
Word 2.3 sec 2.1 sec
Powerpoint 2.9 sec 1.9 secSo the SSD does manage to open the apps faster even on subsequent runs.
I measured OS X startup with the SSD and HDD. There was one bootable Win7 partition, I timed the duration taken from press of the power button to the desktop appearing.
Code:
[B]HDD[/B] [B]SSD[/B]
OS X Startup 1 min 15 sec 0 min 27 secGranted I let the Macbook sleep most of the time and flip the lid and work - but the SSD performance for startup is amazing ! But it's not just limited to startups, shutdowns also benefit. The Macbook usually takes anywhere from 12 to 20 seconds for a normal shutdown. With the SSD, I never see shutdowns take more than 7 seconds, with the average shutdown being 3 to 5 seconds.
One thing often overlooked by people is that the solid state hard disk is well ... solid state ! It means no vibrations, no humming, no chittering, just silence. I honestly thought the WD 320GB was silent because it was a 5400 rpm model. I didnt use a 7200 rpm disk because it vibrated and I could feel the vibrations through the palmrest. But installing the SSD was a pleasant surprise. Pure silence ! (well except for the almost inaudible whoosh of the fan). Switching back to the HDD immediately brought back the vibrations and the chittering sound that was now becoming faintly annoying. I think I'm a SSD zealot now, as far as laptops are concerned
Oh the other good thing with this drive is that BootCamp works. Yes, that's right. No problems with Bootcamp, at least on my MacBook Unibody. I installed Windows 7 x64 beta (and Vmware Fusion 2.0 was already installed on OSX). It took 19 minutes to install Win 7 - that is seriously fast. So how does Win 7 compare in terms of performance benefits ? I timed Win 7 startup from time of pressing enter when choosing the Win 7 disk in the option menu to getting the desktop on screen
Code:
[B]HDD[/B] [B]SSD[/B]
Win 7 Startup 2 min 5 sec 0 min 42 secThis drive is fast. But the numbers above dont tell you the whole story. When using a SSD, do you know how annoying it is that the desktop appears and you still cannot click on anything ? Because the drive is churning away in the background and you dont get foreground control ? With the SSD, the difference is night and day. The system is super responsive. When the desktop appears, you get control and you can click on items. That is a HUGE plus point. It makes my 2.0 GHz laptop act like a 2.66 GHz MBP. I'm happy
Starting virtual machines is faster too, but not significantly so. As always, YMMV
Code:
[B]HDD[/B] [B]SSD[/B]
Win 7 VM Startup 1 min 42 sec 1 min 10 secHere's a WinSAT screenie, with the Disk assessement score showing as 6.7
And finally ATTO running in Win7. Remember ATTO gives funny results when run on the system drive.
After torturing the drive with a few installs and what not, I ran ATTO again ...
It looks like write performance has gone down from 110 Mb/sec to 83 Mb/sec but even after further installs and usage, this value was stable.
OCZ is coming out with a new revision of the firmware that will boost sequential writes by 25% so I plan on installing this and re-testing the drive. I plan to bench mySQL/PostgresQL and SQLite. And Xcode/gcc (time a project build etc). And I will keep an eye out for stuttering (have not seen any so far). I think this is a great drive, now I just need to save up for the 250GB variant
