Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of six solid state drives, together with a low-powered hard disk drive for comparison, during their benchmark runs. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

The Kingston SSDNow V+ (Gen 2) solid state drive was the coolest drive in this comparison. The OCZ Agility 2 (E) 60 GB solid state drive came in a very close second place. In fact, the Agility 2 was a degree hotter while idling and a degree cooler at full load.

At its full load temperature of just 2.8°C above ambient temperature, the Agility 2 was actually cooler than the 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Green, the 160 GB Intel X25-M G2 and the 256 GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue at idle!

Of course, this excellent performance is partly due to the lower number of NAND flash chips used in this 60 GB model. You can expect the power consumption to go up in OCZ Agility 2 models with larger storage capacities.

Transfer Rate Profile

Unlike hard disk drives, solid state drives do not have different areal densities. Hence, a virtually flat transfer rate profile across the entire capacity. The OCZ Agility 2 SSD delivered a read throughput of around 283 MB/s, which is just a tad below the maximum read speed of 285 MB/s.

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