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Although SandForce controllers have powered much of OCZ's solid-state lineup, the company is shifting to its own solutions after purchasing Indilinx early last year. The "Octane" flash drives were the first to use the Indilinx Everest controller last holiday season and now that its SF-2281-based drives are over a year old, OCZ has begun phasing Everest into the rest of its offerings, including the Vertex series.
Since the Octane's launch, OCZ has whipped up a second-gen Everest controller, the silicon behind the company's new Vertex 4. Despite touting more performance than the Octane series, the Vertex 4 appears to be competitively priced with existing SandForce, Samsung, and Marvell-based drives, which should make it a more viable option -- if not the de facto choice -- among high-end system builders...
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Crucial RealSSD M4 C400 256GB SATA600
The RealSSD C400 represents a mild performance gain over last year's C300 during light workloads, it's handily dispatched by competing drives from OCZ and Intel when it comes to heavy multitasking, but that's okay if the C400's price reflects its inferior performance and it does -- there's nothing wrong with delivering an entry-level product.
OCZ Vertex 4 Series SATA600
The OCZ Vertex 4 Series 64GB model packs read and write speeds of 460MB/s and 220MB/s. The 128GB version is much faster with 550MB/s reads and 420MB/s writes. The 256GB and 512GB models feature the same 550MB/s reads, but writes are boosted to 465MB/s and 475MB/s, respectively.
Intel SSD 520 Series SATA600
The Intel SSD 520 Series is aimed at performance buffs with initial SF-2281-based models offering capacities of 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 480GB. It also has a slim design, measuring 100 x 69.85 x 9.5mm and weighing up to 78 grams. The 60GB model packs read and write speeds of 550MB/s - 475MB/s, while the larger 120GB version provides 550MB/s reads and 500MB/s writes. The 180GB, 240GB and 480GB models are slightly faster again as the write performance is boosted to 520MB/s. Naturally, using the SATA 6Gb/s interface is essential to achieving those speeds.
Samsung SSD 470 256GB MLC SATA300
The Samsung SSD 470 features a 250MB/s read and 220MB/s write performance. It uses a flash NAND memory that utilizes 30-nanometer technology and in total there are 16 chips with each IC having a 16GB density. The Samsung 470 Series drives measure 100 x 69.85 x 9.50mm and weigh just 68 grams, thanks to their slim 2.5" design they are ideal for both desktop and laptop computers.
User Comments: 21
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"Once formatted in Windows, the original 256GB is converted to 239GiB, though Windows shows this as 239GB, so it seems like 7% of the original capacity has been lost."
Drive capacity is base 10, 1 GB = 1000 MB, 1 MB = 1000 KB although a Byte is still 8 bits.
Windows is using base 2, 1 GB = 1024 MB, 1 MB = 1024 KB and 1 Byte = 8 bits.
256*1000^3=256,000,000,000 Bytes
256,000,000,000/1024^3 ~= 238.4 GB
1024^3/1000^3 ~= 1.074 aka the 7% difference seen.
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I have read in other reviews that the initial release of the 256GB Vertex 4 was to have 1GB of DRAM but only 512MB "turned-on" with later models to have simply 512MB...I didn't see that mentioned here or unless something changed between then and now. I also want to add that the controller in the V4 is actually a Marvell controller...the OCZ peeps over at their forums seemed pretty agitated when finally breaking down to confirm what a bunch of us already suspected; hence the phrase "Indilinx infused".
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^ Call it whatever you want.
Once again, OCZ's SSD's rick roll anything Crucial has to offer, especially for OS load time, game load time and multitasking.
And the 5 year warranty puts a nice 'we just kicked your butt again' stamp on it.
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Vertex 4 and Octane use OCZ's Indilinx Controller with Marvell firmware, and the 1.4 firmware took the write speeds of the Vertex 4 to the next level for OCZ. The Vertex 4 256GB will be mine... oh yes... it will be mine.
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I also want to add that the controller in the V4 is actually a Marvell controller...the OCZ peeps over at their forums seemed pretty agitated when finally breaking down to confirm what a bunch of us already suspected; hence the phrase "Indilinx infused".
Indilinx Controller, Marvell modified firmware.
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Other than the price coming way down, great news as SSD's are now selling in volume.
The read and write speeds aren't anything to write home about in today's market. Flagship model?
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Nice. Although I have the 512GB in my system, I only have one complaint and that's the firmware updating. Having to connect another drive and boot off that just to update the OCZ firmware is a pain in the butt.
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I don't know for Vertex, but Intel are good. I have 2 180gb 330 series and the 3 year warranty is for read/write 20gb/day. As for the 350 series, the warranty is 50gb/day for 5 years. Unless you are using it for data storage (which is small for that feat), it's still pretty good.
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LNCPapa said:
Having to connect another drive and boot off that just to update the OCZ firmware is a pain in the butt.You don't have to connect another drive to flash it. I flashed my 512GB Vertex 4 using the linux live tools for OCZ SSD's while it was the only drive plugged into the machine (other than an optical drive to boot from).
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Having to connect another drive and boot off that just to update the OCZ firmware is a pain in the butt.
You don't have to connect another drive to flash it. I flashed my 512GB Vertex 4 using the linux live tools for OCZ SSD's while it was the only drive plugged into the machine (other than an optical drive to boot from).
Future OCZ firmware upgrades will be non-destructible as well.
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I've got the Vertex 3, can I upgrade my firmware without wiping windows off the drive?
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LNCPapa said:
Burty - I think it matters what your current firmware is. When I went to flash mine it told me that it was going to be destructive.
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My only complaint, no Vertex 3 performance included in that long list of SSD's for comaprison. Other than that, cool review.
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Darth Shiv said:
Burty - I think it matters what your current firmware is. When I went to flash mine it told me that it was going to be destructive.No Vertex 3 firmware update I've used has been destructive. They usually recommend secure erasing but unofficially you don't have to for any of them.
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Thanks Guys, I will cross my fingers, my Firmware was last updated when I first got the drive last year september time, I haven't actually checked to see if there is an update I just thought I'd ask the question just in-case I had to format the drive, thanks for the info.
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JC713 said:
how can techspot forget the corsair force gt and the corsair force 3... they will kill the ocz
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how can techspot forget the corsair force gt and the corsair force 3... they will kill the ocz
Erm I think you mean the Corsair Performance Pro
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JC713 said:Erm I think you mean the Corsair Performance Pro
Nope I mean the force gt...
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Using what measure? I hope you're not looking just at the sequential read/writes.
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JC713 said:
damn your good! lol
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What the tests fail to distinguish is how the drive performs with less than 50% free space. From what I've read (Tom's Hardware), OCZ has a special optimization technology that is in effect when the drive has more than 50% free space. Once the 50% threshold is crossed, the I/O drops back from "performance mode" to "storage mode", negating the advantage over the competition.
OCZ has been boasting "fastest SSD" by this little caveat. It really would have been useful to see benchmark tests with more than half the drive occupied with data.
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