Review: OCZ ARC 100

Introduction

OCZ is a company whose history of flash storage products began a few years ago with the Vertex range of SSDs that were renowned for being affordable but not the best performers or most reliable. After a tumultuous last few years, the business is now in the capable hands of Toshiba, and is trying to carve itself a new place in the SSD with the ARC 100, one of the most affordable 2.5-inch solid-state drives you can find.

Arriving in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB flavours, the ARC 100 is aiming at the same cost-conscious crowd that has so far responded so favourably to Crucial's similarly affordable MX100 SSD and Samsung's 840 Evo.

OCZ delivered a 240GB model to the TechRadar Pro labs, which has a street price starting at £83 (around $100, or AU$115). Quoted sequential read and write speeds of 490MB/s and 450MB/s indicate the ARC 100 isn't trying to compete with the best performing drives, but its spec sheet looks more than adequate including perfectly respectable endurance and IOPS figures.

Design

The most striking external aspect of the ARC 100 is its brand new blue chassis, a striking shade which doesn't fail to catch the eye. Although it isn't said in as many words, this new choice of colour is as much about a reboot and refocus of OCZ, complimenting this new line of SSDs, as it is looking good.

Powered by a custom Barefoot 3 M10 controller, the Arc 100 houses eight "Advanced" 19nm Toshiba 2-bit MLC NAND chips on each side of the PCB, for a total of 16, equating to 128Gbit per chip. It's to be assumed the lower 120GB capacity drive only uses eight chips, while the 480GB model uses a higher density.

The drive is just 6.7mm high, so will be a standard fit in modern laptops of all shapes and sizes. There's no mounting bracket included for desktop systems, or any bundled software, although it works just fine with the OCZ Toolbox SSD management software which can be downloaded from their site.

Performance and Benchmarks

Is the OCZ ARC 100 a better buy than the Crucial MX100 or the Samsung 840 Evo? Since all three are so close in price, for many people this will be the ultimate question when looking for an affordable SSD.

I wasn't able to test the Samsung 840 Evo under the same conditions as the ARC 100, but I did test a 480GB version of the Crucial MX100 using the same workstation. The OCZ ARC 100 measures up reasonably well, although it doesn't surpass that drive in overall performance.

As usual I first ran CrystalDiskMark for some basic performance results. The ARC 100 managed 408.3 MB/sec sequential read and 427 MB/sec write, approximately ten per cent slower than the MX100.

AS SSD showed the same trend, with 433 MB/sec read, compared with 498 MB/sec on the MX100. Writes were similarly lower, 408.96 MB/sec using the ARC 100, 464.5 MB/sec using the MX100.

Using that program we get a figure for the drive's access time, which comes out as 0.033ms read and 0.057 write, which is pretty good, and no worse than any other consumer SSD.

But compared with a premium drive, SanDisk's Extreme Pro, the differences is more noticeable. Although that drive costs almost twice as much.

Looking at a final benchmark, ATTO, which tests a range of block sizes, the ARC 100 scores a small win over the MX100, in read speeds. Up to 32K it just pips the MX100, although when block sizes get bigger the ARC 100 is slower again and as before both drives are outpaced by the SanDisk and Samsung's 850 Pro SSD.
After all the testing and figures, however, it remains clear that the ARC 100 is a fine SSD, and won't disappoint at all if you're moving from a standard hard disk for your Windows installation. It's far from the best, but it's still one of the least expensive SSDs on the market.

Verdict

We Liked

The ARC 100 is one of the most affordable SSDs around and for that reason alone is bound to be popular. For the majority of people, the fastest possible sequential read and write speeds will have very little effect on overall system performance and the fast access times will still guarantee much better boot times and application load times than you get with a hard disk.

Its endurance is fine as well. Although it doesn't break any records, 20GB a day for three years is enough for the average user. We wouldn't put it in a NAS, and it probably wont be popular for datacenter use, but that's not the target market.

The access times are also pretty good, which is no doubt down to Toshiba's excellent flash memory chips that give Samsung a run for its money when it comes to read speeds.

We Disliked

If you care deeply about the benchmark numbers, the ARC 100 isn't for you. The sequential read and write speeds are some of the worst I've seen in 2014. This is a low-price drive and performs accordingly.

While its very affordable, the Crucial MX100 is slightly cheaper and performs slightly better, which makes it a better product, in my opinion.

It's also a bit mean of OCZ to not include a mounting bracket or free disk transfer software in the box.

Final Verdict

The ARC 100 isn't the best drive money can buy, in terms of performance or endurance, but it isn't trying to be. OCZ has successfully delivered a no-frills, affordable SSD and it's not bad at all.

While it's very inexpensive, I'd only choose it if Crucial's MX100 was completely out of stock.

All things considered when it's running in your PC, unless you run storage benchmarks on it all day long, you won't be disappointed at all or notice much real-world difference.

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