The OCZ Vertex 3 Review (120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2011 6:32 PM ESTFinal Words
This is going to be a pretty frustrating conclusion to write. I'm still waiting for the final, shipping 240GB Vertex 3 to arrive before passing judgement on it but from what I've seen thus far it looks like that may be the drive to get if you're torn between the two. I feel like if you're going to be working with a lot of incompressible data (e.g. pictures, movies) on your drive then you'll want to either go for the 240GB version or perhaps consider a more traditional controller. The performance impact the 120GB sees when working with incompressible data just puts it below what I would consider the next-generation performance threshold.
The bigger question is how does the 120GB Vertex 3 stack up against similar capacity drives from the competition? Unfortunately with only a 300GB Intel SSD 320, a 250GB Intel SSD 510 and a 256GB Crucial m4 on hand it's really tough to tell. I suspect that the drive will still come out on top given that the rest incur a performance penalty as well when going to smaller capacities, but I don't know that the performance drop is proportional across all of the controllers. I hate to say it but you may want to wait a few more weeks for us to get some of these smaller capacity drives in house before making a decision there.
It's clear to me that these SF-2000 based drives are really best suited for use with a 6Gbps interface. Performance over 3Gbps is admirable but it's just not as impressive. If you've got an existing SF-1200 drive (or similar performing drive) on a 3Gbps system, I don't believe the upgrade to a SF-2200 is worth it until you get a good 6Gbps controller.
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rarmstrongtaeus - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - link
Hello, I am looking for any OCZ, or other SSD for that matter, that has the Hynix H27UBG8T2ATR NAND devices as shown in the image above. I am willing to pay a bounty of $500 plus the original cost of the drive for one of these drives as long as it is still functional. Please contact me at 719-306-5539jamesearlywine - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
I bought a vertex 2, and within 3 months the drive just stopped working. I was able to get a replacement from OCZ because the drive was under warranty, but I lost data.I recently bought a vertex 3 about 8 months ago, a couple months ago the drive began disappearing. My laptop would freeze, and when it rebooted, it didn't detect the vertex 3.
I've heard there's a firmware upgrade that might fix this, but I have to backup the drive, install the firmware, then restore from system image.
If you buy an OCZ vertex 2 or 3, make sure to backup your data regularly. I have been severely disappointed by how unreliable these drives are, I bought two, and both purchases have been bad experiences.
axelsp76 - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
Hi Anand and everyone!! Thanks very much for this site. The amount of articles/comments here mesmerizing!Im having an issue with data transfer rates, and I cant get my head around it.
I really wanted to have better transfer rates on my desktop. Im not looking at RAID config at this stage.
I was hoping to get way above the 130 MB/s mark specially using sata III ports on my onboard Intel controller.
The motherboard is EVGA x79 Dark. And although I see spikes of 350MB/s on the first 3 seconds of the transfer rate (windows 8.1 copy details), its safe to say that most of the transfer is done at 130MB/s.
The BIOS has AHCI and ACPI enabled, and I checked that prior to the OS install.
Partition alignment on both drives seems to be ok (offset divisible by 4096) and both drives are about 1/3 from they total capacity. Both are 'twins' 120GB vertex 3 OCZ, purchased in one lot (but already about 3 years old)
The test i did was to transfer a 8Gb folder from SSD to the other. The difference I noted btwn copying a 8gb folder against a 8gb file is that in my case, the first 3 seconds are stable at 300+MB/s for the folder transfer, then it quickly drops to +-120MB/s till the end of the transf.
After reading this article, Im still unsure if I should go for another SSD brand (Samsung 840 pro or EVO), try an external sata controller.
Thanks!