Vertex 2 3.5-inch Overview
I was wondering what the Vertex 2 3.5-inch drive would look like and after taking it out I was surprised. I thought it might have looked like OCZ’s older Colossus drive, but it has a much slimmer and sleek design. On the front of the drive there is a sticker letting you know this is an OCZ Vertex 2 3.5-inch solid state drive.
On the back side of the drive there is another sticker with some information on it. Just like all hard drives you have your SATA data and power connections.
So how does this drive size up to a normal 3.5-inch hard drive. Here is it compared to a Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive. As you can see the drive us much thinner and obviously it weighs less too.
Ok so let’s get inside this drive. To do that you just need to remove 4 small screws on the back of the case, then just slide the back off. Once you get it off you can see a green PCB with all of the components on it.
Just like the 2.5-inch version of this drive the Vertex 2 3.5-inch is powered by the SandForce SF-1222TA3-SBH controller chip. On the front side of the PCB there are 16 Micron 29F32G08CBABA MLC flash chips and 16 more on the back. These chips are 4GB so that is 128GB in total, so you have 8GB left over for provisioning. I’m guess when OCZ says the lower cost per GB, they mean that they are using more lower-capacity flash chips, which would bring the price down some.
