Details
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Ratings: 9/10
It’s been a tumultuous couple of years for
OCZ. The firm was once one of the dominant names in SSD manufacturing, but
financial problems mean it’s had to streamline its current range – which means
that around 150 products have been mothballed.
OCZ’s
home-grown Vector is an excellent SSD
The leaner, more focused firm is now
concentrating on mainstream and enthusiast drives, and its enthusiast drives,
and its Vector is the first high-end SSD to emerge from its factory in this new
era.
This $263 drive isn’t just notable for
being OCZ’s latest high-end bit of kit; it’s also its first drive to use a
genuine Indilinx controller since OCZ bought the boutique chip maker. Previous
OCZ drives have used Marvell parts that had been branded Indilinx, but the
Barefoot 3 is home-grown silicon.
There’s an intriguing story behind this
drive, then, but the Barefoot 3 controller clearly works when paired with 25nm
MLC NAND chips. The Vector’s AS SSD sequential read and write results of
521MB/s and 503MB/s are barely behind the Samsung, and the OCZ drive actually
beat the 840 Pro in AS SSD’s 4KB-64 read and write tests. In the read test, the
OCZ scored 380MB/s to the Samsung’s 281MB/s, and the two drives scored 335MB/s
and 328MB/s in the write benchmark.
It’s a competitive start, but the Vector
wasn’t quite able to keep up when we loaded the CrystalDiskMark tests. There
wasn’t much between the two parts across the apps’ eight benchmarks, but only
in one did the Vector pull ahead. Even then, its 375MB/s pace in the 4KB-32
write benchmark isn’t far ahead of the Samsung’s 369MB/s score.
OCZ’s
memory chips are packed into his month’s best-looking and sturdiest drive
The Vector’s ATTO minimum read and write
results of 10MB/s and 48MB/s are middling this company, but it impressed in the
app’s maximum speed results: its read pace of 559MB/s is the equal of the
Samsung, and its top write score of 535Mb/s is only 1MB behind the Samsung.
That’s a solid set of benchmark results,
and OCZ’s memory chips are packed into his month’s best-looking and sturdiest
drive. We’re big fans of its two0tone color scheme, and the aluminum enclosure
used offers no hint of give – a big improvement on most of the drives here.
A 2.5” -to-3.5” bracket is included, so the
Vector can be installed into a PC straight away, and its five-year warranty
matches the length on offer from this test’s most generous drives. It’s worth
bearing in mind, though, that the Vector uses the chunkier 9.5mm form factor,
so it’s thicker than the 7mm Samsung, and it won’t fit in some slim line
laptops.
There’s very little to choose from between
the Vector and the Samsung when it comes to our benchmarks, but it’s the
Samsung that comes out on top – just. And while the OCZ drive is
2p-per-gigabyte cheaper, it’s not enough to convince us that it’s the best SSD
here. OCZ’s home-grown Vector is an excellent SSD, but the Samsung is still our
drive of choice – if only by a whisker.
