OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts
If you were expecting this drive to be one of the fastest 2.5-inch solid state drives available then you would be right.  The Vertex 3 is the fastest solid state drive we have tested to date, it even beat out OCZ’s own RevoDrive!  In ATTO we had scores of 554MB/s read and 522MB/s write, those sure match up pretty close to the advertised speeds of 550MB/s read and 525MB/s write.  Even more impressive was the 56037 IOPS score we received in AS SSD Benchmark, that sure is very close to the 60K advertised IOPS.

This is a SandForce-based drive so you do get the added features that the new SandForce SF-2200 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 as almost all solid state drives do these days.

Keep in mind though this is an engineering sample from OCZ running BETA firmware.  I can only expect things to get better when OCZ releases the drive with retail firmware on it.  We will be doing a follow-up performance article when that time comes.  Talking about firmware the Vertex 3 currently does not support the OCZ Toolbox software, but I assume it will in the future.

The Vertex 3 will have a MSRP of $499 for the 240GB version and $249 for the 120GB version when they launch at the end of March.  At that time OCZ will not be the only manufacturer using the SandForce SF-2200 chip so expect to see many different drives based on it in the next few months.  Overall ThinkComputers gives the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Editor’s Choice Award!

rating10 10 smallTC award editorschoice small

Pros:
– Impressive scores of 554MB/s read and 522MB/s write in ATTO
– 56037 IOPS score
– 3 year warranty
– Best performing solid state drive we have tested to date!

Cons:
– None that I found

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