OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 17, 2011 3:01 AM ESTToday: Toshiba 32nm Toggle NAND, Tomorrow: IMFT 25nm
The Vertex 3 Pro sample I received is a drive rated at 200GB with 256GB of NAND on-board. The SF-2682 controller is still an 8-channel architecture and OCZ populates all 8 channels with a total of 16 NAND devices. OCZ selected Toshiba 32nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND for these early Vertex 3 Pro samples however final shipping versions might transition to IMFT 25nm. The consumer version (Vertex 3) will use IMFT 25nm for sure.
Each of the 16 NAND devices on board is 16GB in size. Each package is made up of four die (4GB a piece) and two planes per die (2GB per plane). Page sizes have changed. The older 34nm Intel NAND used a 4KB page size and a 1MB block size. For Toshiba's 32nm Toggle NAND pages are now 8KB and block size remains unchanged. The move to 25nm will finally double block size as well.
Remember from our earlier description of SandForce's architecture that its data redundancy requires a single die's worth of capacity. In this case 4GB of the 256GB of NAND is reserved for data parity and the remaining 66GB is used for block replacement (either cleaning or bad block replacement). The 200GB drive has a 186GB formatted capacity in Windows.
This is a drive with an enterprise focus so the 27.2% spare area is not unusual. You can expect the consumer versions to set aside less spare area, likely at little impact to performance.
The 0.09F supercap, a feature of the enterprise level SF-2500 controller. This won't be present on the client Vertex 3.
The Vertex 3 Pro is still at least a month or two away from shipping so pricing could change, but right now OCZ is estimating sales at between $3.75 and $5.25 per GB. The client focused Vertex 3 will be significantly cheaper - I'd estimate somewhere north (but within range) of what you can currently buy Vertex 2 drives for.
| OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Pricing | |||||
| 100GB | 200GB | 400GB | |||
| MSRP | $525.00 | $775.00 | $1350.00 | ||
| Cost per GB | $5.35/GB | $3.875/GB | $3.375/GB | ||
Both the Vertex 3 and Vertex 3 Pro are expected to be available as early as March, however as always I'd be cautious in jumping on a brand new controller with brand new firmware without giving both some time to mature.
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Out of Box Experience - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
Thanks for answering my questionand you are right
with over 50% of all PCs still running XP, it would indeed be stupid for the major SSD companies to overlook this important segment of the market
with their new SSDs ready to launch for Windows 7 machines, they should be releasing plug and play replacements for all the XP machines out there any day now..................NOT!
Are they stupid or what??
no conspiracy here folks
just the facts
Kjella - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Fact: Most computers end their life with the same hardware they started with. Only a small DIY market actually upgrades their hard disk and migrates their OS/data. So what if 50% runs XP? 49% of those won't replace their HDD with an SSD anyway. They might get a new machine with an SSD though, and almost all new machines get Windows 7 now.Cow86 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Very interesting indeed....good article too. One has to wonder though - looking at what is currently happening with 25 nm NAND in vertex 2 drives, which have lower performance and reliability than their 34 nm brethren ánd are sold at the same price without any indication - how the normal Vertex 3 will fare...Hoping they'll be as good in that regard as the original vertex 2's, and I may well indeed jump on the SSD bandwagon this year :) Been holding off for lower price (and higher performance, if I can get it without a big price hike); I want 160 GB to be able to have all my games and OS on there.lecaf - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Vertex 3 with 25 NAND will also suffer performance loss.It is not the NAND it self having the issue but the numbers of the chips. You get same capacity with half the chips, so the controller has less opportunity to write in parallel.
This is the same reason why with Crucial's C300 the larger (256) drive is faster than the smaller (128).
Speed will drop for smaller drivers but if price goes down this will be counterbalanced by larger capacity faster drives.
The "if" is very questionable of course considering that OCZ replaced NAND on current Vertex2 with no price cut (not even a change in part number; you just discover you get a slower drive after you mount it)
InsaneScientist - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Except that there are already twice as many chips as there are channels (8 channels, 16 NAND chips - see pg 3 of the article), so halving the number of chips simply brings the channel to chip ratio down to 1:1, which is hardly a problem.It's when you have unused channels that things slow down.
lecaf - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
1:1 can be a problem... depending who is the bottleneck.If NAND speed saturates the channel bandwidth then I agree there is no issue, but if the channel has available bandwidth, it could use it to feed an extra NAND and speed up things.
But that's theory ... check benchmarks here:
http://www.storagereview.com/ocz_vertex_2_25nm_rev...
Chloiber - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
It's possible to use 25nm chips with the same capacity, as OCZ is trying to do right now with the 25nm replacements of the Vertex 2.Nentor - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Why are they making these flash chips smaller if there are the lower performance and reliability problems?What is wrong with 34nm?
I can understand with cpu there are the benefits of less heat and such, but with the flash chips?
Zshazz - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
It's cheaper to produce. Less materials used and higher number of product output.semo - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
OCZ should spend less time sending out drives with no housing and work on correctly marketing and naming their 25nm Vertex 2 drives.http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=21433...
How can OCZ get away with calling a 55GB drive "60GB" and then trying to bamboozle everyone with technicalities and SandForce marketing words and abbreviations is beyond me.
It wasn't too long when they were in hot water with their jmicron Core drives and now they're doing this?