Final Thoughts
I really like that OCZ has released 2 of their most popular solid state drives in the 3.5-inch form factor. Solid state drives started as boot drives for notebooks, that is why they had the 2.5-inch form factor. So in the beginning if you wanted to use one in your desktop you had to buy an adapter or hope that your drive came with one. The case manufacturers caught up and now 2.5-inch mounting systems are pretty much standard on cases. Now with this drive you don’t even have to worry about that. It will mount just like any other normal hard drive you have.
This is a SandForce-based drive so you do get the added features that the SandForce SF-1200 controller offers. The drive will do real-time loss-less compression. This is why there is no need for a cache chip, but also means less writes to the data cells. RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) is a term we have heard a lot with these new drives. So on top of ECC for data protection RAISE adds another level of security. This drive also supports TRIM.
In out testing the performance was comparable to the 2.5-inch version of the drive, but the 2.5-inch drive did perform a little bit better in most of the tests. ATTO gave us scores of 279MB/s read and 271MB/s write. That is still very impressive as this drive is rated with a max read of 285MB/s and max read of 275MB/s. Although it is not the fastest SandForce-based drive we have tested.
Right now the 3.5-inch 120GB version of the drive sells for $229 at my favorite online retailer, whereas the 2.5-inch version is going for $219. OCZ said this drive was supposed to be a lower cost per GB, but it is actually $10 more. Maybe the price will go down in time?
If you are looking to get a solid state drive and don’t want to mess with adapters or anything like that then this drive is the definite choice. To my knowledge OCZ is one of the only manufacturers to offer 3.5-inch solid state drives in the consumer market. This drive also carries a 3-year warranty, which is pretty much standard for solid state drives.
Overall ThinkComputers gives the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB 3.5-inch Solid State Drive an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Good performance
– 3.5-inch form factor
– TRIM support
– 3-year warranty
Cons:
– The 2.5-inch version performed a little bit better
– More expensive than the 2.5-inch version
