I’ve just upgraded my system and this gives a good opportunity to compare the performance of these drives. My Vertex 2 is 10 months old and has been faultless, while the Vertex 3 and Black are brand new, bought on Friday.
I’ve installed these drives my new PC
- Intel i7 2600K (stock speeds ATM)
- 16GB Corsair Vengence RAM (@1333)
- Gigabyte GA-Z68-UD4-B3
- Corsair HX850W PSU
- *X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
- *ATI HD 5850
- *nVidia 8800 GTS (for extra monitor support)
- *Pioneer DVD-R/W 212 (not important)
- * Antec P182
* Indicates existing components.
I grabbed a copy of the trial version of HD Tune 4.61 for these test and change no default settings.
OCZ Vertex3 120GB (SATA3 interface)
I believe the Vertex3 is advertised with a 550MB/s maximum read, so 511 is OK and I’m happy with an average of 477.4 MB/s.
Purchase Price: AU$325
OCZ Vertex2 120GB (SATA2 interface)
Again, this is around the results marketed.
Purchase Price AU$395 (I bought it as soon as it dipped below $400. About a month later it was < $300… 
)
Western Digital Black 2TB (SATA3 Interface)
I didn’t believe the drop off at first, so I reran the test and got eh same minimum and maximum results (with a 1MB/s variation in burst rate). We expect that HDD’s are slower than SSD’s but the burst rate of the Western Digital completely shames both SSD’s. I’m not sure why this is, because the HD Tune help says The burst rate is the highest speed (in megabytes per second) at which data can be transferred from the drive interface (IDE or SCSI for example) to the operating system. Based on that, I’d expect the burst rate to always be higher than Maximum rate, which is what we see in the Western Digital.
For lols I ran the test on my HTPC, which is an old Pentium D 3.2GHZ (soon to be a Q6600 
4GB DDR2 800) with 2GB DDR2 667 ram. That PC houses vanilla Wester digital 640GB 7200 rpm and two few month old Western Digital 2TB Green drives.
Western Digital 640GB (SATA) 7200rpm
Interesting, so the burst rate is nearly half as much as the Black, and the average transfer rate is nearly half as fast. Cleary the Black is a better HDD than this 4 year old 640GB drive. No surprise.
Next up is the 2TB Green drive, a Sata2 drive plugged into a SATA interface (AFAIK that old Dell mobo doesn’t have Sata2 ports). The Green is the current generation as the new Black above, and only about 2-3 months old. It’s at complete opposite ends of the WD (marketing) spectrum though and is sold as an “Eco” drive.
Western Digital Green 2TB (SATA interface)
Again we can see the drive is definitely slower than the Black, although it’s faster than the old 640GB drive. I think there’s also more cache in the Green than the 640GB.
