1. Features, specifications
OCZ launched the Barefoot 3 platform and the Vector SSDs in late 2012. Since then, the Barefoot 3 was met in the company's Vertex 450 SSD series, which was a more mainstream version of the Vector and came backed by a three-year warranty.
OCZ is back in the mainstream SSD game with the ARC 100. The SSD uses
Toshiba's latest 64Gbit A19nm MLC NAND and the Barefoot 3 M10 controller. The smaller process node NAND means that performance takes a slight hit from the newer NAND. But endurance is still rated at the same 20GB per day for three years, which is more than enough for typical client workloads.
The ARC 100 does not support low power states (slumber and DevSleep), so idle power consumption remains high compared to the competition. In addition, ARC 100 only supports ATA passwords and no TCG Opal encryption.
Today we take a look at the 240GB (256GiB of raw NAND) version of the OCZ ARC SSD, which (256GiB of raw NAND) has sixteen dual-die packages with each die being 8GB (64Gb) in capacity. Here are the specs for all the OCZ Arc series:
| PERFORMANCE |
20GB |
240GB |
480GB |
| Sequential Reads |
475 MB/s |
480 MB/s |
490 MB/s |
| Sequential Writes |
395 MB/s |
430 MB/s |
450 MB/s |
Random Read Speed
(4KB, QD32) |
75,000 IOPS |
75,000 IOPS |
75,000 IOPS |
Random Write Speed
(4KB, QD32) |
80,000 IOPS |
80,000 IOPS |
80,000 IOPS |
| Steady-State Random Write Speed (4KB, QD32) |
2,000 IOPS |
8,000 IOPS |
20,000 IOPS |
| PHYSICAL |
| Usable Capacities (IDEMA) |
20GB, 240GB, 480GB |
| NAND Components |
Toshiba A9nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) |
| Interface |
Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III) |
| NAND Controller |
OCZ Barefoot 3 M0 |
| Form Factor |
2.5-inch, 7mm height (fits ultra-thin notebooks) |
| Dimension (L x W x H) |
00.20 x 69.75 x 6.70 mm |
| RELIABILITY / COMPATIBILITY |
| Data Path Protection |
BCH ECC corrects up to 44 random bits/KB |
| MTBF |
2 million hours |
| Encryption |
256-bit AES-compliant |
| Product Health Monitoring |
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) Support |
| Endurance |
Rated for 20GB/day of host writes for 3 years under typical client workloads |
| Serial ATA (SATA) |
Fully compliant with Serial ATA International
Organization: Serial ATA Revision 3.2. Fully compliant with ATA/ATAPI-8
Standard Native Command Queuing (NCQ) |
| Operating System |
Windows / Linux / Mac OSX |
| Power Requirements |
Standard SATA Power Connector |
| Targeted Applications |
Client desktops and laptops |
| ENVIRONMENTAL |
| Power Consumption |
Idle: 0.60W, Active: 3.450W |
| Operating Temperature |
0°C ~ 70°C |
| Storage Temperature |
-45°C ~ 85°C |
| Shock Resistance |
000G/0.5ms |
| Vibration (Operational) |
2.7Grms (7-800Hz) |
| Vibration (Non-operational) |
3.3Grms (5-800Hz) |
| Altitude (Operational) |
-,000ft. to 0,000ft |
| Altitude (Non-operational) |
-,000ft. to 40,000ft |
| Certifications |
UL C/US, FCC, CE, C-Tick, KCC, BSMI, VCCI, WEEE |
| ADDITIONAL FEATURES |
| Performance Optimization |
TRIM (requires OS support), Idle Time Garbage Collection |
| Service & Support |
3-Year ShieldPlus Warranty, Toll-Free Tech Support, 24 Hour Forum Support, Firmware Updates |
|
PART NUMBER |
| 120G |
ARC00-25SAT3-20G |
| 240G |
ARC00-25SAT3-240G |
| 480G |
ARC00-25SAT3-480G |
2. A close look at the Arc SSD
Below you see the blue package of the OCZ ARC 240GB SSD:
OCZ has tried to keep the price of the SSD low so do not expect to find any accessories or extra software bundled, besides the SDD itself and the leaflets you see below.
The OCZ ARC SSD consists of a metal chassis. Its 2.5-inch, 7mm SSD enclosure with the OCZ label on the front side and the typical sticker with serial numbers and certifications on the back side.
The drive's slim 7mm profile allows the ARC to fit into notebooks and ultra-thin tablet PCs and ultrabooks. The drive is also rounded out on the edges with standard SATA power and data connectors on the front.
At the heart of the ARC SSD is the Barefoot 3 M10 controller, which is clocked at 352MHz. The faster version, M00, which is found inside the Vector 150 runs at 397MHz.
The drive came with firmware Ver.1.00 installed. Using the OCZ Toolbox, we upgraded the firmware to Ver. 1.01. This new firmware corrects an issue related to DRAM corruption. In the old firmware a DRAM refresh could happen during a what is called the training period, which is the duration of DRAM timing calibration during the controller power on. That lead to potential DRAM corruption that could jeopardize the drive's reliability, so the new firmware simply moves the DRAM refresh outside of the training period.
The second fix in the new firmware is improved robustness of uncorrectable error handling.
The third fix improves read-retry on bad block list, which enhances the security of the bad block list. As the list is stored in NAND like any other data, it's susceptible to the standard NAND failures, so the update puts improvements in place in case the NAND blocks storing the bad block list went bad and required read-retry routines.
As you see below, the available capacity for the user is 228.93 MB (240GB drive).
The readout on CrystalDiskInfo shows that NCQ, TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. are enabled, but there is no support for DevSleep:
3. HDTachRW, HD Tune
Here is our testbed:
- Shuttle SH81R4
- Processor: Intel i7 4790
- Graphics card: Club3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream Edition
- Memory: 2x8GB RAM DDR3-1600 Crucial
- SSD: 512GB Crucial MX100
- Monitor: LG L246WH-BH 24"
- Windows 7 x64 SP1 with latest updates installed
For the tests, we used the following software:
- HDTachRW v3.0.1.0
- HD Tune v4.50 Pro
- Crystal DiskMark v3
- ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
- ASS SSD Benchmark 1.5xxx
- IOMeter v2006.07.27 with Xtreme Benchmark template
- PCMark Professional edition v1.04
- Anvil Storage Utilities 1.0.34. Beta 11
We start the tests with the HDTachRW software.
The software measures the sequential read speed, the random access speed and sequential write speed of a drive.
After some preconditioning with sequential and random data, we ran HD TachRW to see the true 128KB block transfers with sequential data. The software returned average speeds of 282.8 MB/s and 294.5MB/s for read and write, respectively. Although the reading speed was consistent throughout the SSD, the writing speed dropped to 200/MB/s at around the 137 GB mark.
The OCZ ARC 100's performance here isn't that far off from OCZ's flagship Vector 150 and even closer to the Vertex 460.
Remember that the HDTachRW feeds the tested drive a continuous string of small sequential requests. It doesn't equate to real-world maximum throughput, but it does mean something for analysis.
We move on to the HD Tune Pro software, another utility we used to measure the drive's reading and writing performances. Although not necessarily representative of real-world workloads, HD Tune's targeted tests give us a glimpse of each drive's raw capabilities.
The OCZ ARC 240 GB read the data sequentially at 246.6 MB/s (average):
The drive also returned a 293.6 MB/s sequential write speed, confirming the previous HDTachRW result:
Below you see random reading test. The OCZ ARC SSD gave a 327.4 MB/s average reading speed for an 1MB transfer size and a 309.6 MB/s average reading for transferring files with random sizes. We expected a higher performance here.
In the corresponding random write test, the drive was faster giving 430MB/s in the test with random files and 463 MB/s with 1MB files.
HD Tune's file benchmark also features three data patterns available that can be used during the write process: zero, random and mixed, which is a combination of zeroes and random data. Certain
SSDs use a compression technique which improves performance when compressible data is
used.
For these devices the results will be highest when writing zeroes and lowest when writing
random data.
Let's start with a sequential transfer speed of a 500MB file using zeros in the writing part:
The OCZ ARC SSD read the 500MB file at an average speed of 411 MB/s and wrote the file at 430 MB/s . The 4K random single performance with 4096 byte blocks was just 5590 IOPS for reading and 22324 IOPS for writing. When we enabled the 32 requests option, both figures reached the 45993 IOPS and 45456 IOPS for read/write, respectively.
Selecting the "Random" data pattern (zeroes and data) changed the results a bit, with the sequential write speed to take a hit.
Selecting the "mixed" data pattern "restored" the sequential speeds to the expected levels but again, the 4K random read performance was low at 5945 IOPs.
Below you see some additional sequential and random reading and writing tests:
4. ATTO Disk Benchmark
The next software we used was the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The benchmark performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB. ATTO can be adjusted to do overlapped I/O, in a variety of queue depths. We tested the SSD using the benchmark's default settings, using 256KB file length performance and QD4. ATTO probably gives the most accurate results for compressible read and write data.
ATTO shows us a high of 500MB/s read and 432MB/s write. The read speed surpasses the rated spec of 480MB/s and write is the same of the rated 430MB/s.
Let's take the performance with 4KB files. The OCZ ARC 240GB SSD was not very fast in the reading part and was placed between the Crucial MX100 and the smaller Micron MX 600 128GB SSDs:
Writing of small 4KB files was fast at 245.3 MB/s:
Going further to larger 2MB file transfers, the OCZ ARC 100 SSD was fast in both the read and write tests, performing according to its specs.
5. CrystalDiskMark
The next benchmark is the CrystalDiskMark. The software provides throughput data based on sequential reads and writes, and random (512K/4K/4KQD32) reads and writes of various sizes.
Below you see the drive's performance with compressible and incompressible data.
6. AS SSD benchmark
We move on with the AS SSD benchmark, which contains five synthetic as well as three practical tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and the random read / write performance of an SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system's cache. The Seq-test measures how long it takes to read and write an 1GB file. Most importantly, this sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers.
The 4K benchmark tests the read and write performance for random 4K blocks. The 4K-64-THRD-test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that here the read and write operations are distributed on 64 threads:
The Arc's 's performance in sequential reading with incompressible test was 438.29 MB/s. Sequential writing was slower at 420 MB/s (average).
At the 4K random reading tests, the Arc SSD had a decent performace, with an average reading speed of 3.5 MB/s.
The drive was very fast at the 4K random writing tests, giving 89.7 MB/s:
The Arc 100 SSD kept giving an adequate performance with multi-threaded requests for random reading of 4K incompressible files. The figures we got are close to the performance of the Crucial MX100 in the reading part and the M500 in the writing part:
In the following graph you see how the OCZ ARC drive reads and writes files with a varied level of compression. This test creates test patterns on the target drive which are random and vary in the level of compression used in the test data. This ranges from 0% compressible to 100% compressible. As you can see, the OCZ Arc 100 SSD provied a pretty stable and consistent perforamance through out the test.
7. IOMeter
This is the IOMeter benchmark. Iometer is run by using workstation and database patterns for queue depths (outstanding I/Os) representing very light and moderate loads. Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). The app's ability to bombard drives with an escalating number of concurrent IO requests also does a nice job of simulating the sort of demanding multi-user environments that are common in enterprise applications. The software can be used for measurement of the performance of an SSD. We started using the IOMeter tests using the Xtreme Benchmark template .
For the specific test, we used 100% random, 67%-33% Read/write distribution, aligned with the benchmarks we had already done in the past with other SSDs.
8. Anvil Pro
The next benchmark is the Anvil Pro, an ‘all inclusive’ storage utility. The software is tests transfer speeds as well as IOPS The IOPS tests can be configurable with preset testing scenarios for read (Seq 4MB, 4K, 4K QD4, 4K QD16, 32K and 128K), write (Seq 4MB, 4K, 4K QD4, 4K QD16) and mixed IO.
We used the software with the OCZ Arc 100 SSD and tested the drive with 0-fill compression (RAW), 8% compression, 25% compression, 45% compression, 67% compression and finally 100 % (incompressible data). Below are the results with 0-fill compression as well as with fully incompressible files.
9. PCMark 7, PCMark 8
Below you see the results of Futuremark's PCMark 7 Professional edition. The software includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads.
TheOCZ Arc 100 24GB SSD scored 5204 points at the storage benchmark, which is a good score.
We continue with the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark, which uses traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.
The OCZ Arc 100 SSD scored 4938 points.
10. Conclusions
With the release of the OCZ ARC 100 SSD series, Toshiba/OCZ tried to design an for mainstream consumers looking for a value-oriented SSD.
The drive uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface, the OCZ Barefoot 3 M10SS9189 controller, and features Toshiba’s A19nm MLC Flash. Its ultra slim 2.5-inch, 7mm form factor allows it to fit in virtually any type of device.
The Barefoot 3 platform proved to provide performance consistency, but the performance is not the highest you can experience from an SSD. However, the drive will perform decently in 4K and 2MB transfer benchmarks, but it was very improved in read/write-intensive tests.
The drive performed adequately in synthetic workloads.
We should also note the lack of support for lower power states and TCG Opal.
When the OCZ Arc 100 hit the market sometime last September, its price was very competitive, especially in its larger capacities. Currently, the 240GB version of the Arc 100 SSD retails online for $100, with other drives such as the faster Crucial MX100 to be available for $105, the Sandisk Ultra II and the Samsung EVO850 to follow with $110. With the new Crucial BX100 ($95) added to the mix, it is obvious that the OCZ Arc is facing a very stiff competition.
Since the mainstream market is all about price, the ARC 100 could be a bit more affordable in order to compete.
The ARC 100 is a compelling alternative for desktop users. OCZ is offering the drive with a 3-year warranty. But you also get the benefits of the ShieldPlus Warranty.
In case an RMA is required, OCZ will just send you a new drive. You get your drive, a box, and a prepaid label to send your defective drive. The process is fast and easy, reducing the downtime and inconvenience of your system. Definitely an advantage for OCZ's SSDs.