OCZ ARC 100 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) ARC100-25SAT3-240G

Pros: The OCZ ARC 100 is competitive with other SSDs of it's class. The performance of SSDs is ultimately limited by the SATA3 interface which hasn't kept up with the improvements in SSDs. The highest performance SSDs use PCIe instead of SATA, however SATA SSDs are generally fast enough for all but the most demanding applications and they are significantly cheaper than PCIe SSDs.

I tested the OCZ ARC 100 on an Intel Z97 based motherboard with a Haswell iCore7 CPU running Fedora 21. The motherboard has six Intel based SATA3 ports and two ASMEDIA SATA3 ports. The Intel ports were significantly faster than the ASMEDIA ports. It's fairly common for motherboards to include a couple of additional SATA beyond those that are provided by the Intel chipset, they should be avoided if possible, or relegated for use by low performance devices such as DVD drives.

I used two benchmarking tools, gnome-disks and sys_basher. The gnome-disks utility has a simple benchmarking facility, sys_basher is a more comprehensive tool. Both are available in the repositories for Fedora 20 and 21. Sys_basher is also available in the EPEL repository for RHEL/CentOS/SL 5,6 & 7.

The gnome-disks benchmark showed the following performance,

gnome-disks, OCZ connected to an ASMEDIA controller SATA port
Read 407 MB/sec
Write 391 MB/sec
access time .05ms

gnome-disks, OCZ connected to an Intel controller SATA port

Read 482 MB/sec
Write 434 MB/sec
access time .05 ms

With sys_basher there were similar results. Using the Intel controller the read and write bandwidths for file sizes ranging from 4K words to 64M words were,

Reads
4K 0.37 MB/sec
16K 49.20 MB/sec
64K 68.41 MB/sec
256K 59.58 MB/sec
1024K 372.63 MB/sec
4096K 420.90 MB/sec
16384K 449.62 MB/sec
65536K 471.65 MB/sec

Writes
4K 38.28 MB/sec
16K 134.30 MB/sec
64K 306.24 MB/sec
256K 444.31 MB/sec
1024K 492.75 MB/sec
4096K 512.25 MB/sec
16384K 524.45 MB/sec
65536K 347.15 MB/sec

As you can see the overhead of the operating system dominates for small transfers and for large transfers the SATA bus becomes the bottleneck.

Cons: Doesn't come with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter. If you are using this in a desktop system you will have to order an adapter separately. The adapters are cheap, about $5, but it would be nice if one was included.

Overall Review: About Me: I'm a Newegg EggXpert, we aren't paid for these reviews but we do get free review units. I'm an engineer who has been designing computers since the 1970s. I specialize in networking and high performance computing.

Pros: Faster then old fashioned platter based hard drives
Quick boots and startups

Cons: The advertise this drive with reads upto 480 MB/S and writes with 430 MB/S. Multiple real life benches with AS SSD benchmark shows Read: 248.55 MB/s and Write: 242.51 MB/s. 4K Read: 43187 iops
Write: 33440 iops

Overall Review: I understand real world benchmarks differ from those done in a QA lab were engineering departments come up with their numbers. They should however come up with numbers though that are closer to real world and not market at such a high read/write speed that is rarely attained.

System specs:

Biostar TA990FXE motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 975
16 GB G Skill PC3-12800
2x MSI AMD 6950 TWIN FROZR III PE/OC
4GB Softperfect RAM disk 3.4.6