A SSD startup has stepped forward to accuse its competitors of an "egregious disparity between promised performance and reality." Christopher George, founder and chief technology officer of DDRdrive, gave a presentation at Open Storage Summit 2010 which claimed some SSD makers have resorted to "dirty tricks" in order to inflate IOPS figures. Performance takes a dive soon after installing a new SSD, said George, taking a stab at SSD maker OCZ, in particular. The accusation was brought up again in a report on The Register, which also got OCZ's side of the story.

George produced charts that show a radical decline in the performance of an OCZ Vertex 2 EX SSD after just six minutes of a sustained test. However, an OCZ spokeswoman questioned the accuracy of George's figures, observing that "it doesn't even exhibit what all other third party media are reporting, and it's clear the testing was definitely run on an unTRIMed drive in dirty state." An OCZ engineer also noted that the DDRdrive presentation only examined particular aspects that "call out some worst case scenarios for Flash-based drives."

SSDs are fast for sure, but it would be folly to assume that advertised figures are anything but that. Actual performance can vary widely and would depend on specific scenarios that include usage patterns, OS platforms, even the predominant file size being used.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Register

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