OCZ Vertex 4 Review (256GB, 512GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPCMark 7
The storage suite in PCMark 7 validates a lot of what we've seen thus far. Despite great write performance, the Vertex 4 can't outperform the Vertex 3 because of its read speed limitations. From OCZ's perspective however, the gap is narrow enough in overall tests to make the shift away from SandForce likely worthwhile. The Vertex 4 doesn't care about compressible vs. incompressible data and it keeps more of the drive's BOM cost in house compared to the Vertex 3.
It's worth noting that for sufficiently light workloads, the difference in performance between any modern SSD is going to be limited right off the bat. We're talking about a 6% spread between the slowest and fastest drive here. For many users, simply finding the right balance of price and reliability is sufficient - which happens to be one of the reasons we've been such big fans of Samsung's SSD 830.
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hechacker1 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I'm not really sure if they are buffering that much data. I'm betting a lot of it is to cache the state of the available flash (tables and bitmaps), and to provide lots of room so you can use memory intensive algorithms to allocate, sort, and combine data before it gets place on the flash.Even with some cache, just because the SSD is so fast, it's going to empty it in 1 second.
vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
As long as it's not too much RAM to write out before the energy in the caps runs out, it's not really a problem.7Enigma - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
But you can show all these pretty specs and graphs but until you fix something like this catastrophe I will avoid your SSD's like the plague:Oh and what controller is in this beauty......Indilinx Everest!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=PSa...
Comdrpopnfresh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
It's nice to see the AES-256 encryption on it. That'll come in handy when the drive dies and has to be sent back to OCZ.I have 2 vertex2's and a vertex3, all of which died, and I have yet to eat or rma- OCZ provides no way to fulfill the warranty without compromising the security of user data. Used to be a big fan of OCZ, and loved their ssds... until this situation arose THREE TIMES.
vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
Sure they do -- encrypt it yourself in software. Anyway, why would you trust OCZ not to be able to decrypt data encrypted by closed-source firmware designed by OCZ?Hurk - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
where is the data for the 128gb version? it will be significantly different from the 256/512, and since im really loving SSD caching on new system builds, the smaller drive is more important to see the numbers for than the 256/512 for me.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Manufacturers often send bigger capacities for reviews (they are the highest performing ones, after all). I'm sure there will be a 128GB review once we get one, which is hopefully sooner than later :-)Reikon - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Nice referral link there.JarredWalton - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
No worries -- they've been marked as spam and are gone now. Let this serve as a warning to others: if you try to put in a referral link in a comment and we mark you as spam, all your comments go bye bye!iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
sorry about that. c an you delete my last entry below. didn't see any TOS against referral links.