HD Tune Pro

Version and / or Patch Used: 4.00

Developer Homepage: http://www.efdsoftware.com

Product Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

Benchmark: measures the performance

Info: shows detailed information

Health: checks the health status by using SMART

Error Scan: scans the surface for errors

Temperature display

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

All of the drives have been retested with the latest firmware other than those based on SandForce SF-2281 controllers. The new performance 5.1 SF firmware has an issue with TRIM so we're including numbers based on fw 3.3.2.

Since the Vertex 4's with the new release candidate firmware are separated in the chart we've highlighted them in red for you. Hopefully you will find this format a little easier to read.

This is where we found the largest improvement with the new firmware update for the Vertex 4. Before we had that nasty 200MB/s limit, but as you can see that is no more. The 512GB V4 model is now capable of 345MB/s average read with a single request and the 256GB model moves to 309MB/s. This is a fairly large jump for just a month of work on the firmware.

Just as OCZ stated in our email that discussed the new firmware, the write speed increased on both models. The 256GB drive saw a very large improvement, from 357MB/s on average to 415MB/s. The 512GB V4 only saw a small increase.

Both drives had a very large, brief moment dip in write speed. This is not uncommon for SSDs. The dip in performance was very brief and it had very little impact on the average numbers recorded.