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OCZ's Vertex Limited Edition SSD: $399 for best-in-class write speeds, only 5,000 available
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.
OCZ Vertex 2 Pro SSD previewed: awesome, and could do with some 6Gbps SATA love
Speedy SSDs might still be a pipe dream for most of us, but at least picking a top brand isn't a challenge. OCZ would no doubt be a popular choice, and SandForce has just made it easier with its debut SSD controller, SF-1500, to be featured on the forthcoming Vertex 2 Pro SSD. Our friends at AnandTech managed to harvest some jaw-dropping results out of their 100GB prototype -- most notably, the drive topped the charts with 2MB sequential performances at around 260MB/s (which is "virtually bound by 3Gbps SATA"), as well as a 50.9MB/s 4KB random write rate. SandForce dubs the magic behind these results DuraWrite, which is likened to real-time compression on the drive thus saving a significant number of write cycles. No prices announced yet, but hey, do we even care any more?
