OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD Review

Julio Franco

Posts: 9,090   +2,042
Staff member
The performance oriented controller used by the Vertex 3 known as the SandForce SF-2281 includes support for the SATA 6Gb/s interface, while boasting read and write speeds of 500MB/s+, a mind blowing figure when compared to previous generation chips.

Read the full review at:
https://www.techspot.com/review/383-ocz-vertex-3-ssd/

Please leave your feedback here.
 
Although I cannot say for certain as we don’t have four drives making this a bit of a fantasy question for now, I would say burst speeds could be four times greater. That said the P67 chipset only supports two SATA 6Gb/s drives, so you would need to purchase a PCI Express SATA 6Gb/s RAID card and they don’t come cheap, nor do four Vertex 3 drives ;)

If you look at our OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB PCI-Express SSD review, which is essentially four Vertex 2 drives in a RAID0 configuration you might get a better idea of what you are asking. In short it would be incredibly fast... https://www.techspot.com/review/342-ocz-revodrive-x2-pcie-ssd/
 
I AM GETTING ONE! :) Just wish Bulldozer would appear first, when are they supposed to show up? June was it?
 
Nice guide Steve, very detailed and thorough as always. :)

Its hard to believe just how fast SSD's are advancing tbh - The prices are getting considerably more reasonable now as well. I'm sure all of these up here make my SSD look impossibly slow!

@Burty,
God, I know how you feel, I'm sick of waiting for BD, going to just get Sandy Bridge instead - I feel like I'll be here still waiting for BD this time next century. :haha:
 
... I think I am ready (performance wise) to invest in a SSD drive... Though $250 is rough for a single drive of course. I better start saving those pennies!
 
Could you open it up and see if OCZ is still using the cheaper "SpecTek" memory chips?
 
Leeky said:

@Burty,
God, I know how you feel, I'm sick of waiting for BD, going to just get Sandy Bridge instead - I feel like I'll be here still waiting for BD this time next century. :haha:

I might have to join you there and get a P67 as well, but I recently won a Asus Crosshair IV Formula!
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM3/Crosshair_IV_Formula/

Which is one of the rare motherboards that can accept a BIOS update to use a Bulldozer chip :(

Or should I sell it? I mean, I haven't even opened it out the packaging it got sent in, I haven't even seen the box yet! :)
 
Be careful if buying one of these - the performance of the 120 Gb version is much different. Any chance of a review of that capacity?
 
@Burty,

In your case I'd be waiting for BD... Senseless going Sandy Bridge if you have a mobo sat there unused that can be used for it. :)

I've now run out of time though, as the mobo died this morning, and I'm now without my gaming PC! :( My partners failed in the week as well, so we currently have two LGA775 PC's with two U/S motherboards (though hers could be CPU possibly), and no spares to replace them.

So need to order another motherboard for her PC, she can use my current CPU and I'm trashing this build and starting fresh. Until then I guess my Toshiba 18" laptop with its GT230M will have to (I frigging hope!!!!) do.
 
I can't help but notice that, although the Vertex 3 didn't come up trumps in benchmarks, with real world testing (Windows boot times, Photoshop start-up time) would it be possible to test the Vertex 3 and other SSDs' performance in gaming?
 
Yep, price is coming down. Maybe in a year, I'll get one, but the price is going to have to come down, to make it worth my while.
 
Yes, I would really like to see a comparison of the 100-120GB SSD's.
As we've seen earlier, the 120GB score significantly slower than the 240GB versions :)
 
Leeky said:
@Burty,

In your case I'd be waiting for BD... Senseless going Sandy Bridge if you have a mobo sat there unused that can be used for it. :)

I've now run out of time though, as the mobo died this morning, and I'm now without my gaming PC! :( My partners failed in the week as well, so we currently have two LGA775 PC's with two U/S motherboards (though hers could be CPU possibly), and no spares to replace them.

So need to order another motherboard for her PC, she can use my current CPU and I'm trashing this build and starting fresh. Until then I guess my Toshiba 18" laptop with its GT230M will have to (I frigging hope!!!!) do.

I think I might just do that :) I just hope Bulldoser is any good...
 
Mind-blowing figures for read and write speeds indeed. For the price of the 240 GB, I can buy a trio of high performance 2 TB Caviar Black HDDs from Western Digital from the local computer shop. I'd say that's pretty mind blowing too.
 
Mind-blowing figures for read and write speeds indeed. For the price of the 240 GB, I can buy a trio of high performance 2 TB Caviar Black HDDs from Western Digital from the local computer shop. I'd say that's pretty mind blowing too.

It is but no amount of Caviar Black hard drives will allow you to experience the level of snappiness that the Vertex 3 will ;)
 
I have a small problem with the statement that Mean Time Between Failure is a number that doesn't mean anything to the consumer. As a consumer, I do look at that number, and it does mean something to me when deciding between brands or models with different measured or estimated MTBFs.

For those who don't know, the number of hours in MTBF isn't how many hours you should expect your drive to last before it fails, either specifically or on average with other drives. The manufacturer did not take one drive and subject it to 2 million hours (228 years!?) of tests before it failed. MTBF is either measured or estimated based on knowledge of failure rates of similar hardware.

The MTBF that OCZ quotes of 2 million hours means that every hour they expect one of the 2 million drives in operation around the world to fail. In other words, for every 2 million hours of total operation among all of its similar drives, the average failure rate is 1.

Put another way, approximately 1 in every 228 drives will fail this year. THAT is a number that I want to know. Compare that with a drive the manufacturer claims has a 100,000 hour MTBF, or a 1 in 11 chance it will fail this year, and you can definitely see why a consumer might like to know.
 
Dont forget vertex 3 uses Micron 25nm NAND flash memory. The 25nm Micron stuff is rated at around 3000 p/e cycles (programm/erase). My old ssd with 50nm nand has 10 000 cycles.
May not be as fat as newest ssd, but I prefer, by hundred miles, endurance over performance.
Still wonder what sata 6Gb/s would do with 50 nm nand.
 
Dont forget vertex 3 uses Micron 25nm NAND flash memory. The 25nm Micron stuff is rated at around 3000 p/e cycles (programm/erase). My old ssd with 50nm nand has 10 000 cycles.
May not be as fat as newest ssd, but I prefer, by hundred miles, endurance over performance.
OMG!!!! It's got the lifespan of a disposable camera...shock horror!!!

Mmmm...lets see. 240Gb drive...minus 30Gb for the OS (being generous), leaves 194Gb after format overhead. Multiply the 194 by 3000 write cycles and you get 582000 Gb.
So if you used 20Gb a day -again, pretty generous considering this would a boot drive and probably* not a storage drive, the damn thing would be near useless after a mere 29100 days ( or 79 years 9 months)...
Then of course there's always going to be some smarta%s* who claims that they would write and erase the whole volume every day- and that would certainly cut down it's lifespan...to a little over 8 years :rolleyes:
 
Thx for the thorough review!

So if I have this motherboard:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1366/P6X58DE/

is the SATA 3 controller (Marvell 9128 series) adequate to get full benefit from the Vertex 3?
 
"Third party embedded solutions such as the Marvell 88SE9128 can provide motherboards with SATA 6Gb/s support, but offer very poor results compared to Intel's implementation. That said, there is a new Marvell 88SE9182 controller that can mimic the performance of Intel's 6 series chipsets, so support for the 6Gb/s SATA is improving."

So in short NO...
 
Using a Crucial C300 64GB I can do a complete restart in 35 seconds From the loading screen it takes ~10 seconds to reach desktop and I'm using SATA II.
 
I don't understand your comment: "The OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial RealSSD C300 were tested using SATA 6Gb/s, requiring us to use the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform"
I've an ASUS P6X58D PREMIUM motherboard and it supports SATA 6Gb/s?
 
I don't understand your comment: "The OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial RealSSD C300 were tested using SATA 6Gb/s, requiring us to use the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform"
I've an ASUS P6X58D PREMIUM motherboard and it supports SATA 6Gb/s?

From the review...

"Third party embedded solutions such as the Marvell 88SE9128 can provide motherboards with SATA 6Gb/s support, but offer very poor results compared to Intel's implementation. That said, there is a new Marvell 88SE9182 controller that can mimic the performance of Intel's 6 series chipsets, so support for the 6Gb/s SATA is improving."

You have the Marvell 9123 which is even worse.
 
Thanks and on which motherboards does the new Marvell 88SE9182 controller appear?
 
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