Details
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Price: $264
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Manufacturer site: www.ocztechnology.com
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Ratings: 6/10
OCZ might be pushing its Vector and its
home-made controller, as its current enthusiast drive of choice, but that
doesn’t mean its older products are worth overlooking. The Vertex 4, with its
powerful specification, is at the front of the queue.
The
Vertex 4, with its powerful specification, is at the front of the queue
It’s based around the Indilinx Everest 2
which, under the hood, is actually made from Marvell silicon – it’s the 9187,
which is a beefier version of the 9175 chip used by SanDisk in its Ultra Plus.
The controller is partnered by 25nm MLC NAND which, while not groundbreaking,
is certainly reliable – it’s also used in OCZ’s excellent Vector drive.
It sounds like a recipe for success, but
the controller and NAND chips showed their age in our benchmarks. Only the
Corsair delivered slower AS SSD sequential read and write results than the
457MB/s and 464MB/s pace of the Vertex, and it returned mixed scored in the 4KB
read and write tests: its read pace of 30MB/s is poor, but its write score of
130MB/s is the fastest here – a surprising turn of speed from this older SSD.
The Vertex’s success was short lived,
however; it returned to the bottom half of our results table in the
CrystalDiskMark tests. Its sequential read pace of 486MB/s is at the bottom of
the heap, its 468MB/s sequential write pace is similarly disappointing, and it
fell behind in most of the apps’ other tests too. Only in the 4KB write
benchmark, again, did the OCZ excel: its 161MB/s score is the best on test.
Its
small file read results are among the worst here, and it can’t match the
Samsung
The Vertex continued this pattern in ATTO
Disk Benchmark. Its minimum write pace of 61MB/s is second only to the Samsung
drive, but its minimum read score of 4MB/s is the worst here. It’s unable to
pick up the pace elsewhere: its peak read and write scores of 546MB/s and
471MB/s are mid-table, and its average read and write results of 320MB/s and
388MB/s are among the worst here.
Like the Vector, OCZ furnishes the Vertex
with a generous five-year warranty, and this drive also comes with a 2.5” to 3.5”
bracket, so it can be installed into a PC straight away. It also shares its
chunky 9.5nm form factor with the newer OCZ drive, and that means this drive
can’t be installed into slim line laptops.
Like
the Vector, OCZ furnishes the Vertex with a generous five-year warranty, and
this drive also comes with a 2.5” to 3.5” bracket, so it can be installed into
a PC straight away.
The OCZ drive has a surprising turn of
speed when it’s writing small files, then, but it’s unable to keep up this
level of pace elsewhere: its small file read results are among the worst here,
and it can’t match the table-topping Samsung for sequential read or writes.
It’s expensive too, at $264 or 74p per gigabyte.
We’d happily recommend the OCZ if it was competing with the SanDisk at the
checkout, but it’s lining up against the world’s best – and it’s just not fast
enough.
