INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Solid state drives may have been around in the consumer market for roughly 8 years now but they are still considered to be amongst the hottest PC/MAC hardware components aimed towards people who are after something more in terms of reliability and performance compared to regular mechanical drives. Certainly although once such drives were very popular mostly amongst gamers and professionals due to their price decrease over the past 2-3 years they've become a lot more mainstream thus you can find them even in low-cost desktop systems and notebooks. Still not SSDs have the same target audience not only because of their performance, capacity and price but also because of their durability and today we'll be taking a look at the latest model launched by OCZ the ARC 100 which always according to them it excels on all four.

   OCZ Storage Solutions – a Toshiba Group Company is a leading provider of high performance client and enterprise solid-state storage products and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation. Offering a complete spectrum of solid-state drives (SSDs), OCZ Storage Solutions leverages proprietary technology to provide SSDs in a variety of form factors and interfaces to address a wide range of applications. Having internally developed firmware and controllers, virtualization, cache and acceleration software, and endurance extending and data reliability technologies, the Company delivers vertically integrated solutions enabling transformational approaches to how digital data is captured, stored, accessed, analyzed and leveraged by customers.

   It's been quite a while since OCZ released the ARC 100 line of SSDs (roughly 7 months ago) so to make up for that on our test bench we have the 480GB model which is the highest capacity of that line. Under the hood of the new ARC 100 line we find the latest A19nm MLC NAND flash by Toshiba paired with an Indilinx/OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller. Now as many of you are aware OCZ took over Indilinx a few years back so thanks to their acquisition by Toshiba just recently they are amongst the very few SSD manufacturers (along with Samsung and of course Toshiba now) that have in their hands both the controller (and the FW of course) and the NAND flash memory of a drive and although it may not sound important to many of you well it should since that means more competitive prices. As for the 480GB model which we have here OCZ reports an endurance rating of up to 20GB per day with read/write speeds of up to 490/450MB/s and random read/write throughout of up to 75.000/80.000 IOPS so let's see just how well it does against most of its immediate competition.

 

 

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PACKAGING AND CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCZ ships the ARC 100 line inside a nice blue box with a product picture at the front and the capacity of the drive inside.

 

 

A few words about the product along with its basic features list are placed at the rear of the box.

 

 

Installation instructions, warranty information and the ARC 100 are the only three things placed inside the box.

 

 

THE ARC 100 480GB

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Size-wise the ARC 100 is just like any other 2.5" 7mm thick SSD so nothing really new to see here aside the nice sticker at the top.

 

 

On a large sticker placed at the bottom you will find the FW version, part number, serial number, barcodes, the electrical requirements of the drive and several certification and warning icons.

 

 

At the rear of the drive we see the usual SATA power and data connectors.

 

 

Opening the drive is not hard just remove the 4 Philips screws placed beneath the top sticker.

 

 

On one side of the PCB we see 8 NAND flash modules by Toshiba (the new A19nm ones) and a single Micron DRAM cache chip (512MB DDR3-1600).

 

 

8 more NAND flash modules by Toshiba are placed on the opposite side of the PCB along with yet another Micron DRAM cache chip (the 480GB model has a total of 1GB DDR3-1600 cache).

 

 

The Barefoot 3 M10 controller is placed at the center of the PCB and makes use of a thermal pad to transfer heat onto the aluminum enclosure.

 

 

TEST BED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TESTING METHODOLOGY

 

   After roughly 6 years of testing sold state drives i have concluded that it's almost impossible for any single benchmark suite to accurately measure their performance and that's why in certain benchmark suites we see amazing read/write performance numbers with some drives while in others things are quite different. The reason behind this is that some benchmarking suites are configured to read and write random chunks of data while others read and write constant (sequential) ones. So that's why i always use a very wide selection of benchmarking suites including AIDA64, HD Tach RW, HD Tune Pro, Crystal Disk Mark, Sisoftware Sandra Pro, AS SSD, IOmeter and ATTO. To get the most accurate results each test gets repeated a total of 6 times with the average performance numbers recorded into our charts. Also as of February 25th 2015 our results will also include the Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) IOMeter tests. These tests include a 12 Hour write test used to “simulate” performance degradation over time and a mixed workload test which basically shows what you can expect when using an SSD continuously for roughly two hours. Unfortunately due to the time required for these tests we repeat them a total of 3 times and not 6 as the above.

   Many people made inquiries about the charts ever since the last comparison so once again please do keep in mind that the Charts have the average performance numbers of each drive recorded and not the peak (highest) ones. Also although every single one of these programs can help potential buyers choose the right drive for their needs you should also remember that from any kind of benchmark up to real world usage the gap is not small (and usually most differences will go unnoticed by most people). All tests were performed in a fresh Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installation with every update installed up to February 25th 2015.

 

 

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS - HD TACH RW / HD TUNE PRO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK X64

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS – AS SSD / IOMETER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS – IOMETER SNIA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see we used an extra graph to showcase the decline in write performance during a 12 hour period between the three drives we performed the SNIA tests with. Of course more drives will be added onto the charts and graph in time but for now we wanted you all to get a better understanding of these tests and having the ARC 100 alone wouldn't show much.

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   It's no secret that it's been almost 4 years since the last time i had something from OCZ here (not to mention that the last SSD to feature a controller by Indilinx was here even before then) so when they said we should expect their ARC 100 480GB SSD i had no idea of what to expect. Now OCZ has always produced very good quality SSDs but being out of touch with them for 4 years along with their recent acquisition by Toshiba complicated things. Luckily this transition with Toshiba has obviously allowed OCZ to step up their game and release even more affordable and excellent performance SSDs. Of course the ARC 100 is certainly not the fastest SSD money can buy currently but the SNIA tests we performed show that it's clearly a very good solution for professionals and generally users with heavy workloads. Obviously I’m not saying that the SNIA methodology represent real world scenarios since the settings used simulate workloads worlds apart from what the average user will ever come across but still it does help to show the performance degradation of SSDs in the long run. Also worth mentioning is that OCZ offers their ShieldPlus Warranty for the ARC 100 line which basically allows consumers to receive a replacement for a faulty drive without having to provide a receipt (you need just the S/N of the SSD) or pay for shipping from and to OCZ since you will get a pre-paid return label along with the replacement drive.

   After wrapping up all our tests it's clear that thanks to Toshiba not only did OCZ manage to produce a high performance drive with excellent durability and of course constant performance (the SNIA tests prove that) but they were also able to put a very affordable price tag on it since currently the ARC 100 480GB SSD retails for USD194.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 193Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk). True you will find many other SSD models at around the same price range some of which may even offer 512GB of space but if you do care about constant performance then the ARC 100 480GB is really the way to go and that's why it gets our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality (Toshiba A19nm NAND Flash)
- Very Good Overall Performance
- Constant Performance (SNIA Tests)
- OCZ 3-Year ShieldPlus Warranty
- Price (For Some)

 

CONS

- Not Available In 1TB