OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx?

[acku]

OCZ breaks new ground with its Vertex 4 in that this isn't a SandForce-flavored SSD. The company's latest flagship features an Indilinx Everest 2 controller that definitely impresses us. Can Vertex 4 stand up against the SSD 520, m4, and Samsung 830?

OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx? : Read more

 

[compton]

Octane was not a special and unique snowflake; Indeed, someone else's fingerprints were all over it. Vertex4 is certainly unique, but I fully expect the next round of drive launches using Marvell products to look like the V4, but possibly with some more balance.

 

[billybobser]

Seems to good to be true.

We'll see how they are once they've been out in the open for 6 months when problems will/will not flare up.

 

[maxinexus]

As Billy said only time will tell. These preliminary tests are great and pricing is better but still SSD are expensive...we need to get to cents not dollars per GB. Anyway good start OCZ...now the only thing you need is your own NANDs...perhaps in few years

 

[jgutz2006]

This is a great step and makes financial sense for OCZ to come to market with a competitive product and possibly undercut all the others. Its a no brainer im my world. Force Samsung to sell units with less profit margins

 

[Branden]

it'll be interesting to see how reliable these drives are and what their failure rate is going to be. OCZ's vertex 2 and 3 drives were horribly unreliable - in my experience 50% failure/DOA rate, my local shop said they see about 10% of them returned due to failure (and that's just within their 2 week return window alone).

sorry OCZ, you've lost my business this time around. i've since replaced all my remaining OCZ SSD's with crucial m4's, they may not quite perform as well as your latest offerings but in my experience reliability > performance.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

When I built Son No.2 's box, we installed the Seagate Barracuda XT on Friday and measured boot times at 21.2 seconds to the Password entry screen. The Vertex 3 arrived on Monday and after installing that, we measured boot times at 15.6 seconds. Not commenting on the actual times as differences in hardware as well as testing parameters could push it in any direction, but what I will comment on is the HD choice for this test.

My testing showed it took 36% extra time to boot off the HD instead of the HD. This test has it taking 226 % longer. If we're gonna test the best SSD's, I'd sure like to see a best in class HD added to the comparisons.

 

[burnley14]

[citation][nom]Branden[/nom]it'll be interesting to see how reliable these drives are and what their failure rate is going to be. OCZ's vertex 2 and 3 drives were horribly unreliable - in my experience 50% failure/DOA rate, my local shop said they see about 10% of them returned due to failure (and that's just within their 2 week return window alone).sorry OCZ, you've lost my business this time around. i've since replaced all my remaining OCZ SSD's with crucial m4's, they may not quite perform as well as your latest offerings but in my experience reliability > performance.[/citation]
It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.

 

[drwho1]

all I read was: support for 2TB... *drooling*
Price for 2TB SSD?
*not drooling anymore*

 

[mitunchidamparam]

ocz FTW

 

[OntarioHero]

Hmmm. Basically OCZ decided "Indilinx too slow! sod it, stick 1GB buffer in there!"

 

[crewton]

I love my vertex 2. I'm looking forward to seeing what ocz comes out with next!

 

[iamtheking123]

I'd have like to see the 520 included in the benchmarks rather than the 320. Yeah it's higher priced but it's also the most reliable ssd on the market.

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]JackNaylorPE[/nom]When I built Son No.2 's box...[/citation]
You lucky dog! I wanted a similar naming system of "son 1, 2, 3" and "daughter 1, 2, 3" or even "Thing 1, 2, 3" but my wife would not let me
[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.[/citation]
I completely agree, got a 60GB Solid 3 for my wife's PC about a year ago, and just picked up a much larger 240GB Agility 3 for myself. I have also put them in a few PCs for friends and have yet to have a single issue. I think a lot of the bad rap they got was due to bad firmwares that caused any number of issues, but after the last major update last summer I have not been hearing the same complaints.

Also, are those boot times including POST? because my system boots in 9-10 sec after post, which is half the time of these scores and I don't even have a 'performance' SSD

 

[nagol567]

Looks nice but ill stick with a 120 second gen

 

[jaquith]

Outstanding IOPS!

We really need SATA Express yesterday...SATA3 is saturated.

 

[A Bad Day]

How many 7200 RPM hard drives would it take to match OCZ's SSD? Seek time is out for sure, unless if a HDD manufacturer drops a 60k RPM HDD on the market.

 

[acku]

[quotemsg=9529790,15,515213]You lucky dog! I wanted a similar naming system of "son 1, 2, 3" and "daughter 1, 2, 3" or even "Thing 1, 2, 3" but my wife would not let me

I completely agree, got a 60GB Solid 3 for my wife's PC about a year ago, and just picked up a much larger 240GB Agility 3 for myself. I have also put them in a few PCs for friends and have yet to have a single issue. I think a lot of the bad rap they got was due to bad firmwares that caused any number of issues, but after the last major update last summer I have not been hearing the same complaints.

Also, are those boot times including POST? because my system boots in 9-10 sec after post, which is half the time of these scores and I don't even have a 'performance' SSD[/quotemsg]
From the time you hit the power button to desktop.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com

 

[acku]

[quotemsg=9529787,14,405303]I'd have like to see the 520 included in the benchmarks rather than the 320. Yeah it's higher priced but it's also the most reliable ssd on the market.[/quotemsg]

See our SSD 520 review. Basically same scores as Vertex 3 because they are both SandForce.

 

[acku]

[quotemsg=9529770,3,553140]Seems to good to be true.

We'll see how they are once they've been out in the open for 6 months when problems will/will not flare up.[/quotemsg]

Agreed!

Cheers,
Andrew Ku

 

[freggo]

HDs are here to stay for affordable mass storage for a few more years but SSDs are definitely getting to the point where you don't have a reason to NOT using one as a boot/system drive.

How long until boxed PCs like Dell or HP will be offered with an affordable SSD/HD combo ?

 

[gam0reily]

I am not a big SSD fan, but strangely, Vertex 3 seems 1.5 times faster at writes in comparison to vertex 4. Whats up with that? :-/

 

[DaveUK]

My Vertex 2 died completely within a month and a half of installing in a new laptop - many users on-line experiencing the same problem with those drives, disgusting to encounter such a catastrophic fault rate in a system-critical product really.

Purchased a (then more expensive) Crucial M4 to replace it, and have been very happy with it ever since. Glad to see it still benchmarks very consistently across the board, and they're even cheaper now in the UK... I think I'll buy another for a gaming rig that I'm planning.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]soldier37[/nom]Try using a better cpu next time like a 2700k. Have mine overclocked to 5Ghz on liquid stable, the i5 is for the poor..[/citation]

I highly doubt that I'm the only person that is tired of seeing you troll about your elitism and epeen. Sandy Bridge i5s are NOT poor man's CPUs, they are equivalent to the SB i7s for gaming and everything that isn't able to use more than four threads well. Not everyone can afford a setup with the most expensive LGA 1155 consumer CPU and multiple GTX 580 3GBs (you said that you have more than one 580 3GB on more than one article's comments section) and even if they could, it would not make a difference for these tests. SATA SSDs don't run faster from having more CPU threads and CPU cache (the only two differences between the i5s and i7s besides slightly better binning).

The i5 is for people who don't want to waste their money on i7s that they could never use well enough to be worth the money unless they have software that uses 8 threads and they must have the fairly moderate performance boost in said software. Considering how you act, I have to assume that you are simply a rich gamer and don't do productivity work that actually uses the i7, so your i7 is actually not running any faster than the i5-2500K would for gaming.

Now on topic for the article, OCZ seems to be doing very well with their controller. It seems that if Sandforce doesn't do something to stay ahead, OCZ might overtake them in performance across the board instead only in some workloads. OCZ just needs to improve write speeds and power usage at idle. Oh, and reliability. I haven't bought an OCZ SSD yet, but I hear more bad things about reliability about them than I hear good things about their performance. However, the reliability problems are always about their Sandforce drives so far, so maybe they build their Indilinx based drives better.

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]acku[/nom]From the time you hit the power button to desktop.Cheers,Andrew KuTomsHardware.com[/citation]
That would do it, thanks for the clarification.