OCZ Vertex II bigfoot 120G So slow!

[Vapor matt]

Hi everyone, well heres the deal, i bought myself a ocz vertex II bigfoot drive so it would fit the sled in my mac pro 4.1 ect, the drive has been my main OS drive for 5 months now and seemed quite happy running lion, I was just looking into getting me this SATA 3 PCIE controller card as it works in MAC OS X

http://www.amazon.co.uk/PCIE-SATA-eSATA-CONTROLLER-CARD/dp/B00560ZOGO

Having just done the 4.1 to 5.1 upgrade with a W3680 Cpu and 12g of 1333mhz ram i thought sata 3 would be nice. so purchased the above card. anyway thought i would look at some sata 3 SSD drives and come across blackmagic disk speed test on the app store. had a look at some utube vids and thought i would give it a try.

well my OCZ vertex LL bigfoot drive write performance is worse that the WD black standard hardrive. only getting 72mbs read at 190mbs now it should be 250ish so i have no idea whats going on but before i go and buy another SSD would one of the WD sata 3 velocity raptor drives be a better bet as these SSD drives do seem to slow down after a while.

any advice or info aprciated

 

[icstoo]

Hi,

I've had a similar experience with a 2.5" Vertex 2 in my 2009 mac mini. I had a Vertex 1 in there and Disk Speed Test said I was getting 30-40MBps (dead slow) so I seized the opportunity to replace it with a Vertex 2. I now get 70MBps reads and 180MBps writes. I asked a question on here recently as to why the reads were so low, and people suggested updating to latest firmware from OCZ website and also that Disk Speed Test might not be that accurate. I'm afraid I can't confirm any solution as I haven't bothered updating the firmware because I don't actually experience any slowdown issues at all... Have you noticed any slowdown of your system/beachballs?

IC

Edit: Also, I've got a Vertex 3 in a 2011 MBP and Disk Speed Test is around 500/480 read/write so it is possible to measure these speeds. The one other thing I would point out is that the Vertex 2 and 3 (but not the original Vertex) have garbage collection built in, so it isn't so bad not to have trim support. I could be mistaken on this but I think these drives hold up fairly well on the speed front.

Edit 2: I would also point out that conventional platter hard drives are priced through the roof at the moment due to the flooding in Thailand. You would also still be missing out on the fast access times of a SSD if you went this route. If it were me, and you aren't suffering any slowdown issues, I would stick with the Vertex 2 or if you really wanted, upgrade to SATA3 (6Gbps). Applications launch instantly and the whole experience is so much smoother

 

[Vapor matt]

Hi icstoo


Thanks for the reply, well its interesting that you had about the same speeds with your vertex II. I dont get beach balls but having just completed a clean install of lion on my WD black sata drive, its not far from booting the same as the ssd vertex drive, but the write performance is 40mb quicker, yes read is slower but not that much that you can see.

Iam now thinking that maybe a WD raptor drive sata3 would be a better bet than another SSD a 600G drive would be plenty but i dont know if that fit the sled, some say the HALX drives do but before i hit the button i would like to know for sure.

 

[Vapor matt]

well I've updated the vertex 2 bigfoot to the latest firmware and its made no difference to write speeds at all, read also remain the same.

I never enabled trim support in lion as the vertex 2 has garbage collection built in.

The performance remains bad even though it has the latest firmware ect.

iam reluctant to go back to standard hardrives but don't want another slow down SSD either. the vertex 3 looks good in the bench marks, but OCZ have a new SSD and controller coming at the end of the month OCZ Octane SSD wonder if i should wait for these see how they look in reviews.

Edit 1

Well having read all about the new drives act the vertex 3 seems to be the drive to beat so i have 1 on order so will let you know how it goes with the PCIE SATA3 card in lion.

 

[derbothaus]

well I've updated the vertex 2 bigfoot to the latest firmware and its made no difference to write speeds at all, read also remain the same.

I never enabled trim support in lion as the vertex 2 has garbage collection built in.

The performance remains bad even though it has the latest firmware ect.

iam reluctant to go back to standard hardrives but don't want another slow down SSD either. the vertex 3 looks good in the bench marks, but OCZ have a new SSD and controller coming at the end of the month OCZ Octane SSD wonder if i should wait for these see how they look in reviews.

Edit 1

Well having read all about the new drives act the vertex 3 seems to be the drive to beat so i have 1 on order so will let you know how it goes with the PCIE SATA3 card in lion.

Your issue could just be that you bought the bigfoot. My OWC SATAII and SATAIII's all get over 250MB/s read and write and they are the same controller's as the OCZ's.
And you are correct, you do not need TRIM with Sandforce based SSD's.
Getting a Vertex 3 over a Vertex 2 will net you very little. A bit of a boost with 4K and 256K but that is all. More importantly the Vertex 2's are quite a bit more stable than the Vertex 3's.

 

[Vapor matt]

Your issue could just be that you bought the bigfoot. My OWC SATAII and SATAIII's all get over 250MB/s read and write and they are the same controller's as the OCZ's.
And you are correct, you do not need TRIM with Sandforce based SSD's.
Getting a Vertex 3 over a Vertex 2 will net you very little. A bit of a boost with 4K and 256K but that is all. More importantly the Vertex 2's are quite a bit more stable than the Vertex 3's.

well the vertex 3 SSD's have the uprated sand force chip, plus i plan on running it with a PCIE SATA 3 controller card so it should be a lot faster than the vertex 2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/PCIE-SATA-eSATA-CONTROLLER-CARD/dp/B00560ZOGO

The above cards work in mac OS X natively so aim hopping i will be able to boot from it with SATA 3 vertex 3 and get full speed unlike the SATA 2 on my mac pro which would limit the vertex 3 SSD

 

[derbothaus]

well the vertex 3 SSD's have the uprated sand force chip, plus i plan on running it with a PCIE SATA 3 controller card so it should be a lot faster than the vertex 2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/PCIE-SATA-eSATA-CONTROLLER-CARD/dp/B00560ZOGO

The above cards work in mac OS X natively so aim hopping i will be able to boot from it with SATA 3 vertex 3 and get full speed unlike the SATA 2 on my mac pro which would limit the vertex 3 SSD

No bootable SATAIII cards that I know of yet. Happy hunting though. If you find one that guarantees it. please post back.

 

[Vapor matt]

Well Iam now booting from a SATA-3 PCIE Card that i listed above that lion OS X has native drivers for and getting read speeds of 400mbs +





wooohooo now data 3 is fast!

 

[derbothaus]

Nice.