OCZ SSD Guru

With the Vector 180, OCZ introduced a new software that will be standard-issue with all OCZ SSDs based on its homebrew Barefoot 3 controller, the OCZ SSD Guru. These include the Vector 150, Vertex 450/460, Arc 100, RevoDrive 350, and AMD Radeon R7 SSDs. Current owners of these drives can get the software from OCZ, free of charge.



The OCZ SSD Guru is a highly functional software suite for Windows and replaces the OCZ Toolbox. It offers many more features than its predecessor, such as drive tune-ups, OS optimization, a more intuitive diagnostics tool, and two important new features—the ability to update the firmware for the drive you booted from and TRIM-on-demand for, again, the drive you booted from. These two features were not available on the older OCZ Toolbox, and users often had to move their bootable OCZ drives to other machines for a firmware update, or use the DOS-based bootable CD method. TRIM on demand may let some enthusiasts beat their performance OCD, although Windows 8.1 already lets you TRIM SSDs on demand with its SSD-aware Defrag tool.



The SSD Guru app starts up with a pleasant home-screen (Dashboard) that gives you a quick heads-up on the main usage areas and the health of your drives. There are additional pages for drive- and system-specific info, with a separate page for your SMART value read-outs and some basic help on how to interpret those values (i.e. when not to panic).



The "Tuner" tab on the SSD Guru app lets you perform two important tweaks for the drive: on-demand TRIM (cleans out deleted-yet-physically present data, improving write performance) and fine-tuning OP (over-provisioning, allocating some space from your drive's user area for the drive to use as a scratch-pad to improve overall performance and reliability). Then there's an"OS Tuner" tab to optimize OS settings so they go well with SSDs. Unlike similar functions by competing apps for other such products, such as Samsung Magician, OCZ's app offers you some intuitive presets.



The "Maintenence" tab lets you perform some expert-level tasks on your drive, such as updating its firmware or secure-erasing it. As we mentioned earlier, you can now update the firmware of the drive you booted from, which was previously impossible with OCZ's older Toolbox app. The app can automatically look up the right firmware for your drive, so you won't accidentally flash it with the wrong one. If you're sure of what you're doing, the app also lets you feed it custom firmware. This may void your product's warranty, though. Secure-erase lets you wipe the data on your drive by flashing your drive with zeroes. With just one pass, secure-erase makes data unrecoverable. For obvious reasons, you can't secure-erase a drive you booted from.