OCZ Vector 150 (120GB & 240GB) Review

Final Words

The Vector 150 is a logical successor for the Vector. It doesn't redefine SSD performance, yet OCZ has managed to add enough improvements to the Vector 150 to make it a different product. The first one is IO consistency. While the Vector had good performance consistency to begin with, the Vector 150 takes that one step further. It's without a doubt one of the most consistent (if not the most consistent) SSDs we have tested and that's a big achievement. Especially for heavy workloads with lots of random writes the IO consistency is a very important performance metric because the drives tend to be in steady-state (or close to it) due to the amount of writes and you definitely don't want your application to be waiting for your SSD.

The second major improvement is endurance. 50GB/day for five years should cover almost any power user's need for endurance (or if not, you should really invest in an enterprise class SSD). Remember that it's 50GB seven days a week for five years -- even one day with less writes a week will give you even more headroom to play with. 

Power consumption is the only thing I have a problem with. For desktops the power consumption obviously plays no role (unless you're building a huge RAID array and want it to be as power efficient as possible) but for mobile it's one of the cornerstones. Battery life is one of those things where you can never have enough and while the rest of the components usually play the bigger role, an SSD can still have an impact of half an hour or so depending on your laptop. 

With the original Vector OCZ shifted their goals and tried to lift up their brand image by focusing purely on the high-end segment and the Vector 150 continues that strategy. As a result, the Vector 150 is definitely at the upper pricing segment but there is always a price you have to pay for performance. Compared to SanDisk's Extreme II, Vector 150's most likely rival, the MSRPs are fairly competitive. At 120GB, the Vector is cheaper but at higher capacities SanDisk has a small advantage. However, it's good to keep in mind that we're dealing with MSRPs, so take the prices with a grain of salt until we see what the retail prices end up being.

All in all, I'm excited to see what OCZ has up their sleeve for their SATA Express (i.e. PCIe) based Barefoot 3 successor. We've been limited by the SATA 6Gbps bus for quite a while already, which is why there haven't been any tremendous upgrades in performance compared to what for example the SF-2281 brought when it was first released. The Barefoot 3 is a platform with lots of potential and it shows that OCZ's Indilinx and PLX acquisitions have provided the company with the knowledge they need to stay competitive in the SSD space.