Final Thoughts
Well when I reviewed the Vector drive back in January I said it was a step in the right direction for OCZ and the Vertex 450 seems to follow along that path. The Vertex line now has the Barefoot 3 controller and that should make many people happy. Along with that you have the newer 20nm NAND as well. The Vertex 450 is more of an update to the Vertex 4 and it pulls it off with style.
Looking over our tests we can see that the drive performed up to specifications in almost all of the tests. Our ATTO Disk Benchmark scores for read and write were 550 MB/s and 296 MB/s respectively. Also as far as read performance goes the drive was very solid, the graphs showed a very constant speed. Of course write tests were a little different, but as I said in the Vector review the Barefoot 3 controller is very impressive. Also you do not have to worry about a loss in performance when it comes to incompressible data like you would on SandForce-based drives. The Barefoot 3 controller does not have this issue.
OCZ was nice enough to send us two drives so we could set them up in a RAID 0 array. This gave us twice the storage and practically twice the speed! Who wants a 256 GB solid state drive with normal speeds, when in our case we had two 128 GB drives running giving us speeds of around 1GB/s for read and 577 MB/s for write! Not that bad at all! Talking about price I have found the 128 GB version of this drive online for around $90. If you pick up two of these that would still make them cheaper than most 256 GB solid state drives and don’t forget having them in RAID makes them much faster than your normal SSD.
OCZ is also still one of the companies that gives you a drive adapter for their SSDs. While many people have SSD spots in their case some may not. Also who cannot love the I love my SSD sticker they provide as well. For those wondering OCZ is backing this drive with a 3-year warranty as well.
Overall ThinkComputers gives the OCZ Vertex 450 drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Sleek design
– Great performance
– Incredible performance and value with two drives in RAID
– 3 year warranty
Cons:
– Slower write speed on the 128GB version
