Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
OCZ has had a long-standing relationship with my PC’s. I have had plenty of RAM, Power Supplies, and other various items in almost all of my rigs over the years. However, there hasn’t been an SSD from OCZ in the lab… until now. As far as SSDs go, I am a big fan of the Crucial M4 linup; so much so that it has made its home in my regular system. Today, OCZ thinks they can sway me with their Indilinx infused Vector SSD.
OCZ promises that this drive delivers “the industy’s fastest performance” at 100,000 random read and 95,000 random write IOPS. To add to that, they claim that this drive is capable of sequential read speeds of 550MB /s, sequential write speeds of 530 MB /s. These are pretty stout numbers; will they add up?
Note: The image below was captured from the OCZ product page.
The Vector is a 2.5″ SATA III drive available in 128GB (VTR1-25SAT3-128G), 256GB (VTR1-25SAT3-256G) and (512GB VTR1-25SAT3-512G) flavors that features an Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller, which is the reason for the Indilinx infused graphic. It supports TRIM and sports 25nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND. Inside the packaging you get the drive, a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter, a user manual, and an activation key for Acronis True Image HD software. The Vector will weigh you down a bit more than the Crucial M4, at 115g it is 45g heavier. The additional weight is attributed to the OCZ’s choice for the enclosure. It will also consume more juice than its competitor. The Vector will eat up .9W while idle and 2.25W while active vs the M4 at .065W idle and .15W active.
Additionally, this drive is rated for 20GB per day of host writes for 5 years, BCH ECC correction for up to 28 random bits/1KB, and a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of 1.3 million hours. What does that add up to? A five year warranty… and some data reassurance.
Internally, the Vector homes sixteen of Micron’s 29F128G08CFAAB NAND. There are also versions of this drive floating around with OCZ branded NAND (M2502128T048SX22). Additionally, the Vector features a 256MB PC3-12800 (DDR3-1600) buffer on each side of the PCB. The thermal material on top of the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller was left intact for later benchmarking.
