High-performance OCZ Vector SSD surfaces at Intel Developer Forum

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,240   +192
Staff member

The successor to OCZ’s flagship Vertex 4 solid state drive was recently spotted at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco. The Vector apparently wasn’t on display for the general public but Engadget managed to get some quality face time with the new SSD ahead of an official unveiling.

The publication says the Vector will include an all-new controller, the Indilinx Barefood 3, which was developed completely in-house without any outside assistance from Marvell, unlike the Vertex 4 and Octane series. Anandtech further notes that the drive they looked at used Micron MLC NAND despite being branded with the OCZ logo.

ocz vector ssd ssd ocz vector

Based on the photo above, we can surmise that this will be a 2.5-inch drive that uses a standard SATA 3 interface. The high-end drive will be available in capacities of 256GB and 512GB later this year (sometime in Q4). Unfortunately that’s all we know at this hour as pricing and performance specifications still remain unknown.

OCZ released the Vertex 4 SSD in April backed by a full five year warranty. The fourth generation drive was built around the Indilinx Everest 2 platform and features sequential reads up to 550MB/s and sequential writes of 510MB/sec (for the largest capacity drive) with an industry-leading 120,000 IOPS.

We recently put the 256GB Vertex 4 through the paces and found that despite the small price premium, it was easy to recommend the drive to anyone seeking a high-performance SSD. The drive even earned our “Outstanding!” award with a score of 95 out of 100.

Photo courtesy Anandtech.

Permalink to story.

 
Barefood = Barefoot
And the OCZ Vertex 4 is not based on an Indilinx controller, it is actually a rebranded Marvell controller.
This drive will be OCZ's first Indilinx drive since their acquisition...
 
Speed of SSDs is good enough. I want capacity. Intel dropped their 120gb 320 from $200 to $100 last week which is nice.
 
I wonder how the Barefoot 3 controller compares to the Marvell 88SS9187 in the Plextor M5 Pro with Toshiba 19nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND.
 
Back