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, Z77 and X79 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.

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 with 1.4RC Firmware

OCZ Vertex 4 256GB with 1.4.1.5 Firmware

Across the board we see performance increases to both read and write speeds. These take place in every transfer size. ATTO is used by manufacturers to show claimed maximum performance and as you see here OCZ can now claim 511MB/s write speed, up from 470MB/s. The maximum read performance claim is now 560MB/s, up from just over 540MB/s.

The read performance of 562MB/s is the best we've seen to date on a 2.5" form factor SSD. This puts the Vertex 4 256GB drive right up against the limits of what we think is possible with SATA III.