The test system used in this review was an HP 8200 Elite. The computer came equipped with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3250312AS 250GB SATA 6 Gb/s hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro FX580 512MB PCIe graphics card and an Intel 82579-LM gigabit network card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Toshiba's OCZ VX500 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the VX500 is based on Marvell's 88SS1074B1 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB |
 PNY CS2211 480GB |
According to Toshiba, the 512GB VX500 is capable of reading at 550 MB/s and writing at 515 MB/s when connected to a SATA 6 Gb/s port. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
 Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
PNY CS2211 480GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The VX500 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 554.1 MB/s and write at 524.1 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the VX500's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the VX500 had average read and write speeds of 368.2 MB/s and 238.3 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 321.9 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, unlike most other MLC-based SSDs, the VX500 uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 350 MB/s and then drops to about 110 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the VX500's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB |
 PNY CS2211 480GB |
When tested with ATTO, the VX500's read speeds topped out at about 554 MB/s and its write speeds at 525 MB/s.
