Vector Solid State Drive Overview
The first thing you will noticed when you take the Vector out of the box is that it does have some new branding. Instead of the normal sticker that was in the center of the drive there is a new redesigned sticker that covers the entire top of the drive. It looks really cool and if you are planning a mod where you will be displaying a few of these drives they are going to look great.
Moving around the drive you have your typical SATA data and power connections. On each side of the drive there are 2 mounting holes. Flipping the drive over there is a sticker with all of the serial numbers and information on the drive as well as a QR code. You will also notice OCZ has moved away from a black chassis design and have gone with an aluminum look, I really like it. This drive is 7mm thick so you shouldn’t have any problems installing it in your Ultrabook.
Getting inside the drive is pretty easy. Warning: If you open your drive you will be voiding your warranty. To get inside the Vector remove the 4 small screws on the back of the drive and pull the back off. This will reveal the PCB inside. If you want to take the entire PCB out just remove 4 more screws and you can take the entire drive out of the casing.
Under the heatpad you see in the photo above is the brand new Barfoot 3 controller. As we said this controller has been designed completely in-house by OCZ. This controller is based off an ARM Cortex processor along with OCZ’s proprietary Aragon co-processor. The Aragon is a 400 MHz 32 bit processor with solid state drive RISC instructions, which should provide better performance. The Barefoot 3 is an 8-channel controller.
The Barefoot 3 controller is paired with two Micron 256MB DDR3-1600 chips, and there is actually a spot for a third. While the 16 NAND chips are labeled OCZ they are 25nm IMFT synchronous MLC chips.
