OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB SSD Review

Yesterday, courtesy of UPS, my new solid-state drive (SSD) arrived. I was going to do a video unboxing, but decided not to because there really was not much to see. Anyways, I bought this SSD as an upgrade from my 250GB mechanical hard disk. Obviously, size was not the deciding factor here, speed was. I now use the SSD as my boot disk, and there is enough room to keep most of my data on it as well. The 250GB hard disk is now used for extra data space and my Windows disk (I don’t need the speed boost there, I rarely boot into it).

The OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB drive has read speeds up to 240 Megabytes per second and write speeds up to 145 Megabytes per second. This is compared to my mechanical hard disk with read speeds of around 60 Megabytes per second and even slower write speeds. Now, what makes the Turbo different from the original Vertex series? The 64MB of cache used by the drive has been overclocked from 166MHz to 180MHz. This boost definitely provides a smoother ride for everyone.

I run Linux. Aside from that phrase just being ridiculously awesome, it also means that I use special utilities like sreadahead, which helps the operating system during boot, leading to faster boot times. The sreadahead utility also benefits from SSDs’ speeds. My system used to take around 50 seconds to boot, including BIOS. Now it boots in half the time. Now I do not have to be so grumpy when I need to reboot, because being the impatient geek I am, every second away from my desktop is agony.

I also noticed a performance boost during package updates. Ubuntu’s dpkg software processes and configures packages three times faster than it use to take. This means that now, my bottleneck is my internet connection, a measly 8Mbit downlink that is further cut in half by our old wireless hardware.

Physically, SSDs are unbelievable. I never thought I would see an internal data storage component to be so light while staying sturdy. I am confident that I could drop it a thousand times and it would retain all my data (I can not guarantee the floor will come out looking spotless, unfortunately).

That wraps up the short review of this awesome SSD. If you are interested, go ahead and get in on the SSD game yourself.