Verdict: Not all SSDs are quicker than hard disks.
The OCZ Core Series makes no particular claims to bludgeoning desktop hard disks into the technological Stone Age with its speed. Instead, low power consumption is its main feature, and it's aimed squarely at portable devices.
However, OCZ still specifies a 143MB/sec read speed and a 93MB/sec write speed, which potentially places this drive among the fastest current hard disks. Simpli Software's HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0. produced some curious results, however. Usually, SSDs are slower at writing data than reading, but this is particularly true of the OCZ. It provided an average sustained read rate of 113.5MB/sec, but a write speed of just 32.4MB/sec.
We also expect SSDs to maintain their performance across their entire capacity. While this was true with the OCZ's read speed, it was very slow when writing to roughly half of its capacity, with the data write rate dropping to as low as 16.6MB/sec. The random access time of 0.4ms is fast compared with a hard disk, but most SSDs can manage a time of 0.1ms.
This disk only provides 28.16GB of usable storage when it's formatted, as it's a 30GB disk.
Thanks to the poor write performance, the OCZ achieved a dismal score of 511 in the Gimp image editing portion of our Media Benchmarks - around 45 per cent slower than a hard disk, and much slower than a 32GB Samsung SATA SSD (see Issue 60, p69), which scored 940. The OCZ also took 40.3 seconds on average to load the Relic level of Crysis. The Samsung can load the same level in 32 seconds, while the spinning platter-based Western Digital VelociRaptor (see Issue 59, p55) can load the level in 34 seconds, even if it does spin those data platters at 10,000rpm.
Conclusion
With such disappointing performance, the 30GB OCZ Core Series has little to recommend it. It's too slow to challenge other SSDs or hard disks. It's more rugged than a 2.5in hard disk, but you'll slow down your laptop if you use this disk.
