OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD Review - PAGE 1

Just two months ago we examined the Indilinx Everest platform for solid-state drives, which is based on the Marvell 88SS9174 design but features slightly faster clock speeds and different firmware. While we found the new controller to be strong in most regards, it didn’t quite have the same performance as SSDs using the SandForce SF-2281 processor. The very latest Indilinx controller was built to go head to head with SandForce as the second generation Everest 2 platform has industry leading sequential read performance of up to 550MB/s as well as I/O performance of up to 120K IOPS, and access latency as low as 0.02ms. All of this means the new processor will be to able to access data quicker than the previous generation, while also having strong performance at lower queue depths and higher throughput.

Since the new Everest 2 platform boasts such high performance, OCZ has decided to use it in their flagship Vertex SSD series. The latest drive is dubbed the Vertex 4, and along with the new Everest 2 controller it utilizes high quality Intel 25nm Synchronous Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash and supports the SATA 6G interface. Like the previous generation Everest controller, the Vertex 4 utilizes on-board DRAM to cache data but with this drive OCZ has doubled the memory compared to the Octane from 512MB to a whopping 1GB of DDR3 memory. The host clock of the controller has also been set higher at 400MHz instead of 333MHz to improve the performance.

Though OCZ has managed to push the performance of the new Everest controller to new heights over the previous generation models, the overall price of the Vertex 4 is still reasonable. Things are really starting to look up for SSDs built on the Indilinx Everest platform, but let’s first see if the heightened speeds translate into better real-world performance.