Here's an interesting one. OCZ is essentially retailing the never-made-it-to-market Vertex 2 Pro as the Vertex Limited Edition. It runs the SandForce SF-1500 controller, which the Vertex 2 Pro put to
such stunning good use in its prototype form, but unfortunately that controller proved to complex and costly for OCZ to mass retail the drive. Instead it's offering the Vertex Limited Edition, 5,000 drives sporting the superfast controller. The drives come in 100GB ($399) and 200GB ($829) flavors, and once they're gone they're gone. It's a better performing drive (particularly on writes) than the similarly priced
Intel X25-M G2, but unfortunately the limited quantity isn't the only thing to worry about: there were some issues of failing drives with the Vertex 2 Pro. Only time will tell as to how well the supposedly-improved firmware of the Vertex Limited Edition will hold up, but all 5,000 might be sold by the time some serious reliability testing can be performed. We supposed that's just part and parcel with life in the fast lane.
posted February 19th 2010 7:18PM
OCZ's support on their SSDs has sucked with previous models. Who in their right mind will buy an SSD they admitted they couldn't get working correctly and then officially discontinued before they started selling it?
@Jason Litka wow... really?
@Jason Litka
I bought one Crucial SSD and I can not believed how fast things are for me right now (upgrading from a raptor X 150gb). Game load, application load, everything is faster. You'll see a dramatic boost with ssd compare to raid, cpu, gpu upgrade.
@Jason Litka
OCZ has the best support of any SSD maker except Intel, so Im not sure what youre talking about.
@cdf74dc9 I have a crucial drive too. Its fabulous.
Remeber that the Sandfarce, excuse me, Sandforce controller falls flat on its face in real world application.
@fel Go to newegg.com. Find the OCZ Vertex drives. Look at the average star ratings. Read the comments. I had an OCZ Vertex drive work perfectly for a couple of weeks then turn into a brick. Yes they RMA'd the unit, but the replacement drive is now just sitting there since I don't trust it. A friend of mine had a similar experience. I'm now using a Samsung SSD instead (Corsair branded). Yes its not as fast. But I can't accept something with the sort of failure rates the OCZ drives are having...
With such a high price, and limited production they could've at least made it SLC NAND Flash. Than it would practically last forever when coupled with that SandForce controller.
128GB of SLC would have cost a LOT more than $400. We'd have been looking at $1500 or more.
*too
@Prokanda
Glad I'm not the only one.
why not post the speeds?
@TrumanHW
because they did like 2 posts ago.
write: written.
read: read.
fastest sata device ive ever seen.
@vlad the inhaler
Yeah - I remember.. I think both were approx 250mb/s. However, the link here is broken, and I shouldn't have to read every post here to know what a new post here is talking about. The same reason that TV shows give a quick overview of what happened last week so you can watch this week without penalty.
The Vertex is a Samsung. Just buy a Samsung SSD. The true creator of these SSD. Or you can buy Intel.
The Vertex did not use a Samsung controller. It was their Summit SSD that was Samsung-based.
@Jason Litka
actually, the Vertex is a Samsung. You are BSing you your ass off.
Based on the collection of benchmark performance tests we've conducted, the OCZ Vertex EX offers performance that reaches the advertised maximum speeds. EVEREST's linear full-sector bandwidth performance was a steady 246 MBps, and write-to performance for this SLC SSD peaked at 187 MBps. The single-layer Samsung flash modules paired to a 166MHz 64MB cache buffer on this 120GB Vertex EX SSD help yield a 0.08 ms response time. ATTO Disk Benchmark tool reported an impressive 262 MBps maximum read bandwidth in our tests, and an equally impressive 192 MBps maximum write. HD Tach recorded additional high-performance results, with approximate bandwidth speeds reaching 232 MBps read and 220 MBps write.
Right there. a Samsung SSD as a foundry. rebadged as a OCZ vertex
@FlasH Dude, you absolutely don't know what you're talking about. When people talk about SSDs what they usually mention is the CONTROLLER. Which in the cast of the OCZ Vertex is the Indilinx Barefoot controller. Apparently very good. What you're talking about is likely the maker of the Flash chips, which might well be Samsung since they make a lot of Flash chips. When people say "a Samsung SSD" what they usually mean is one with a Samsung CONTROLLER. Samsung makes a respectable controller, which has good but not great performance. However, its compatible, reliable and as a result is the one chosen as the OEM drive for most laptops if they offer an SSD option. The maker of the Flash chips likely doesn't affect the performance of the SSD at all, though they might affect its reliability...
@Fanfoot
""ude, you absolutely don't know what you're talking about. When people talk about SSDs what they usually mention is the CONTROLLER.""
Well we are talking about the module.
""Which in the cast of the OCZ Vertex is the Indilinx Barefoot controller. Apparently very good. What you're talking about is likely the maker of the Flash chips, which might well be Samsung since they make a lot of Flash chips. ""
And this is important because?? SSD were outrageously expensive with Intel's pricing scheme. Samsung challenged them and is selling SSD's half the price of intel. Regardess of 'performance' the SSD of Samsung is world class. Just watch youtube videos of them.
""When people say "a Samsung SSD" what they usually mean is one with a Samsung CONTROLLER. Samsung makes a respectable controller, which has good but not great performance. ""
Yeah, right, watch the youtube videos of the Samsung SSD. They are OUTRageously good. You are completely bullshitting yourself to delusional fantasies.
"However, its compatible, reliable and as a result is the one chosen as the OEM drive for most laptops if they offer an SSD option."
Okay, then.
"The maker of the Flash chips likely doesn't affect the performance of the SSD at all, though they might affect its reliability..".
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. The flash chips of course affects the performance of an SSD hard drive. without good components withing the flash memory drive, DDR, DDR2 DDR3,Nand flash memory, all are affected at different speeds. have different chip capacities design outlook. a 30 nm chip will burn cooler and run faster, be denser and save energy compared to a DDR3 40 NM chip.
The consumer SSD has enough speed. We need better price badly.
So what are the numbers on 4K random reads/writes? I'm not buying an SSD if it only doesn't suck on large, bulk, contiguous transfers, that defeats the purpose. My 10K RPM drive can muster up 100MByte/sec too (which is plenty fast.)
Trim? If not these will really suck.
Methinks Engadget didn't do their SSD studies before publishing that the new OCZ drive is faster than the X-25M.
If you're using the drive for anything more than moving LARGE files back and forth between drives, raw write speeds are only half the story. Raw speed is important for cameras, but not the most important spec for computers. I'll wait for reviews instead of judging the product solely off of the manufacturer's promotional material.
@Smurf
I think it's you who didn't do your homework. Anand found a pre-production model to match and beat Intel's drives at small random writes as well as large sequential transfers:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702
And their quick look at the LE:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747
Wow, that OWC on the second page of the new article has an incredibly cheap looking PCB. I wouldn't go anywhere near that thing.
@Smurf Silly me, not having read a review published two hours before my comment. Anand --> RSS.
100GB? wat
@SimonRichards
Probably 128GB, but the other 28 are reserved as overhead as cells die- SOP for server class drives
"...unfortunately that controller proved to complex and costly for OCZ to mass retail..."
TOO
I would rather have the new 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300. Performance is on par with this drive. Review is on hothardware.
@(Unverified)
HotHardware doesn't have much clue how to test SSD's. Read Anand's latest article which includes some quick tests of the Vertex 2 Pro, LE, and C300. The C300 is amazing in a couple categories, but really struggles in some very important ones.
wow! Thank you! Стас
I was pretty excited to theoretically get two of the 100gbs and raid to beat 200 in price and performance. till i got to failing issues..
This Vertex SSD is a Samsung.
Here
Based on the collection of benchmark performance tests we've conducted, the OCZ Vertex EX offers performance that reaches the advertised maximum speeds. EVEREST's linear full-sector bandwidth performance was a steady 246 MBps, and write-to performance for this SLC SSD peaked at 187 MBps. The single-layer Samsung flash modules paired to a 166MHz 64MB cache buffer on this 120GB Vertex EX SSD help yield a 0.08 ms response time. ATTO Disk Benchmark tool reported an impressive 262 MBps maximum read bandwidth in our tests, and an equally impressive 192 MBps maximum write. HD Tach recorded additional high-performance results, with approximate bandwidth speeds reaching 232 MBps read and 220 MBps write.
Right there. a Samsung SSD as a foundry. rebadged as a OCZ vertex