OCZ Vertex 4 Review (256GB, 512GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPower Consumption
The Vertex 4, similar to the Octane before it, consumes entirely too much power at idle. OCZ tells us that this is a known issue, also fixed in the next version of the firmware that should reduce bring it down to roughly 0.75W at idle. At ~1.3W today, the Vertex 4 would draw more power than many 5400RPM 2.5-inch hard drives at idle - something to keep in mind if you're planning on putting this thing into a notebook.
Under load however, the Vertex 4 does quite well. It's more power efficient than Samsung's SSD 830, while offering similar if not better write performance. If your aim is better battery life and not performance however, you may want to stick with one of the 3Gbps Intel drives instead.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
127 Comments
View All Comments
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.