#ZOTAC PREMIUM 240GB
By Nimish Sawant / 28 Apr 2016 , 11:54:05
ZOTAC, a name which is quite well known in the graphics card and mini PC space has now diversified into the SSD segment as well. It has started off by releasing three categories of SSDs – the Premium, the T500 and the Sonix PCIe based SSDs. We got the 240GB Premium SSD for testing. Let us check it out.
Build and Design
ZOTAC is known for its black and yellow colour accents with its graphics cards and mini PCs. But with the Premium 240GB SSD, you just get a black coloured aluminum SSD with just the ZOTAC logo painted on it. It is as simple as it can get with ZOTAC. Only the packaging has a hint of yellow which gives some semblance that this is a ZOTAC product.
It comes with a SATA 6 Gbps interface and has a 7mm z-height making it ideal to be inserted in your laptop. There are three capacities of the Premium edition drives: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB. Opening up the SSD requires you to pull out the top sheath and the PCB is screwed on to the base.
There are four Toshiba A19 MLC NAND chips on either side of the PCB along with the Nanya 256MB DDR3L cache buffer. The Phison S10 controller – the 8-channel quad-core controller is seen on the ZOTAC Premium SSD.
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Performance
ATTO Benchmark
This is the most popular storage benchmarking tool and allows you to check read and write speeds across various transfer sizes and queue depths. ATTO is also a good tool to check for the marketing spiel of SSD makers where they publish sequential read and write speeds on the packaging.
AS SSD
AS SSD is a benchmark tool built specifically for SSDs which uses incompressible data and calculates sequential and random read and write speeds and gives an overall score at the end. It also gives you the input/output operations per second or IOPS for each of those tests which is interesting. Apart from this you can also perform Copy Test where it creates test folders for large files simulating ISO, programs and games and measures the transfer speeds and duration.
PC Mark 7
PC Mark 7 is a complete PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 having a dedicated Storage test module. It is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of your PC’s SSD. The Secondary Storage test allows you to test drives other than your system drive. It simulates operations such as importing pictures, gaming, starting applications and so on.
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage utilities is another versatile SSD benchmark tool which besides having an in-built SSD tool, also allows you the option to tweak the settings. Just like the AS SSD benchmark, you get a read, write and an overall score. The tables are more in-depth as it gives you response time, IOPS, MB read/written and finally the transfer speeds in MB/s. You can perform threaded I/O read and write tests where you can adjust block size as well as the queue depth. We ran the SSD test using 100 per cent incompressible and 46 per cent compression.
Verdict and Price in India
ZOTAC has released a good SSD to start off its entry in the SSD market with. At Rs 6,999 for the MRP, the ZOTAC Premium 240GB performs at par with the Kingston HyperX Savage SSD which costs Rs 2,500 more. In terms of 4K random read and write speeds too the ZOTAC Premium is better than the Savage. And the in terms of IOPS it outclasses most of the drives in the charts when it comes to read operations. This is certainly an SSD worth considering if you are building a mid-range (Rs 40,000) rig.