OCZ 30GB Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTX30G)
Jun 9th, 2009 | By SimonTo an unknown user, the OCZ Vertex appears to be like all the other OCZ Solid State Drives. It’s a black box with an adhesive label indicating the series and capacity. Function comes first in my books over form and the OCZ Vertex does exactly that. Once installed in your PC or notebook, it’ll rarely see the light of day but under the hood is a powerful engine waiting to roar to life.
The OCZ Vertex is leaps and bounds better than the original JMicron Solid State Drive. If you’re an owner of the first generation drives and noticing your performance and system is starting to fall behind, it is time for an upgrade. I was originally pleased with the JMicron MLC SSD but after a few short weeks of use my notebook started to hang for a few seconds at a time. As OCZ clearly indicated on their packaging, my OCZ Vertex gives me faster access times resulting in a far more stable machine. The 64MB cache has made a world of difference and OCZ didn’t sacrifice too much bandwidth for the improved access time. We’re still well into the 140MB/s Write and 200MB/s Read. With Win7 just around the corner and the OCZ Vertex already claiming to support the TRIM command, OCZ’s Vertex has a very bright future ahead of itself.
Advantages
- Significant improvement over first generation SSDs
- New controller with cache provides significant reduction in random access times
- Vertex family has up to 250GB capacity
Disadvantages
- Premium price
- Power consumption increased with new controller and cache
I’d like to thank OCZ for making this review possible.
My hdd died a few weeks ago… I have some spare traditional drives I could have replaced it with but wanted something new to play with and wanted to ease the bottleneck that normal drives create. I got 2 of these 30gb drives for the price of one, do to a deal I worked out with a customer, and in raid0 they KILL traditional drives. KILL.
The Intel X25-M is still king of the hill because of its read speed with 4kb files. The X25-M scores 112,164 on my system with 4KB read (ATTO) vs. the Vertex 50,000. I have personally used 5 different types (SLC, MLC JMICRON 1, MLC JMICRON 2, Vertex, Intel) of SSD and nothing compares to the X25-M.
Sean wrote:
We’re doing a review for HighPoint card and the results are smoking indeed. We’ll have the results up soon and they are definitely good
Frank Rizzo wrote:
Yes, the Intel X25-M is still the king of the hill but not everyone can afford one and that needs to be taken into considerations. You’re looking at twice the price for an Intel SSD vs the Indilinx MLC.
Simon wrote:
The Intel drives are actually less expensive than the Vertex. I just bought another X25-Ms 80GB from Newegg.com for $289.95 (free shipping) yesterday. That is $2.96 per Gigabyte.
The OCZ Vertex 30GB is $4.30 per Gigabyte AFTER you factor in the rebate.
The Vertex drives aren’t bad, but they are OVERPRICED. The 30GB drive should sell for $75 not $149. The 120GB Vertex is not worth a dime more than $180. I would consider a 120GB Vertex for $180, but I’ll take an 80GB Intel ($290) over a 120GB Vertex ($355) any day of the week.
Frank Rizzo wrote:
If the Vertex 30GB cost $75 and the 120GB cost $180 then it would definitely be a steal and it would sell out in no time. As it stands even if OCZ’s cost per GB is still higher the overall cost for being able to own an SSD, and get good performance, is much lower than buying an Intel drive. Not everyone can afford $300 for an 80GB Intel SSD. The $130AR makes the Vertex a very promising buy and the $150 saved could be put to other upgrades.
@ Sean:
I have 2 vertexes in raid 0 as well with windows vista, the only thing they killed is each other…
something is obviously wrong with my installation, I used to get random hangs, but now it is even worse, windows crashes with one of the drivers not detected any more on restart… I have to leave my system cool down before it can detect the driver again…
strange…