The Toshiba OCZ VX500 (256GB, 512GB, 1024GB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 13, 2016 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
When starting from an empty drive, the VX500 delivers a great average data rate on the Heavy test, second only to Samsung's 850 EVO and 850 Pro. When starting from a full drive, the VX500 suffers greatly as its SLC caching is not well-tuned for this kind of abuse.
The average service times of the VX500 aren't the best in the empty-drive case, but aren't anything to complain about. The penalty from running the test on a full drive is extremely clear as latency is roughly doubled.
The percentage of high-latency operations shows once again that stressing the SLC cache and garbage collection with a full drive causes trouble, but the performance for the more common case of a lightly-used drive with ample spare area is fine.
Energy efficiency is once again a strength of the VX500, even for the full-drive tests—it runs slower in that case, but doesn't drag out the test for so long that the faster but higher power drives come out ahead for total energy.
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zodiacsoulmate - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
I like their RMA... but their Vector series is such a disaster i have to RMA my drive 3 times, and they finally give me a Vector150 which has been solid... SMART reading is getting a lot worse these days, i'm using it sololy for caching now... I have their Vertex 3 and Vertex 4, those drives are quite better than the first gen Vector drives...shabby - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
Will you be reviewing the intel 600p and samsung pm961(960 evo) any time soon?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
Yes, we have the 600p in-house. So you will be seeing it soon.bug77 - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
Looks like a pretty pointless product to me. Then again, maybe it's only meant to tick a few checkboxes so that it can be sold to OEMs.ocztaec - Thursday, September 15, 2016 - link
Hi bug77,Thank you for your feedback. We believe that there is still a market for mainstream SATA with MLC. For users that are not quite ready for NVMe VX500 will provide the long term reliability/endurance they need. Our 5 year Advanced Warranty service helps ensure mainstream users have peace of mind should there be any issues. Thank you again for your input.
Arbie - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
For at least six months we've had the Mushkin Reactor 1TB drive for $230. How is this OCZ worth $340 today?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
It's nice to see MLC SSDs still out there, but I'm not sure the VX500 is really worth the MSRP. They're asking a lot for their 1TB model. I think the price increase isn't worth the benefits MLC offers over the plethora of much cheaper TLC drives.kfleszar - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
I wish Intel 540s was included among the compared SSDs.DanNeely - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
Am I missing it, or are these not in Bench yet?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
They're in Bench, I just forgot to uncheck to box that keeps them hidden. We can't set the to automatically go public when the review embargo expires.