We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: AVADirect, GIGABYTE, LSI, Corsair and Noctua.

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

In order to fully utilize SATA III you need a system with native SATA III support. P67, Z68 and Z77 systems are preferred, but AMD has made advances in their newer SATA III systems as well. Older X58 systems with Marvell based SATA III ports do not deliver the same high levels of performance, so we recommend newer systems when available.

X79 is a newer chipset, but it is based on an enterprise chipset that does not perform as well as our P67, Z68 or Z77 systems.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

OCZ Vertex 4 256GB

The new firmware worked out very well for the 256GB Vertex 4. The read speeds shot up from around 535MB/s to nearly 543MB/s. OCZ and many companies have started using ATTO with a queue depth of 10 instead of the standard 4 that we've run for the last ten years. With a queue depth of 10 we achieved the stated read speed of 550MB/s.

OCZ Vertex 4 512GB

Oddly enough, the 512GB model is now just a little slower than the 256GB in the write test at the lower queue depth. The read speed is just a little higher, though.