This does not come in a retail box, although it will for you. This is the
OCZ Vertex 3. So, this is a very, very
exciting product because it comes as a
successor and as a worthy successor to the Vertex 2, which has pretty much
dominated the SSD market for the past
considerable amount of time.
So with the Vertex one, OCZ had competitors that were like competing
controllers that were not Indelinks, which was used by OCZ as well as a
number of others at the time uh out on the market such as in uh Intel uh where
performance was not necessarily the strongest argument for getting a Vertex
1, especially later on in the life cycle. With the Vertex 2, there hasn't
been that much that's been close or beated in terms of performance and but
but it was still a pretty close race. You had competitors like the Crucial
C300 that were pretty close largely in
part largely in part largely due to the
fact that they used a SATA 36 Gbit per second control um interface. So the
Vertex 3 changes all that. It gives us a
new sandforce controller. This is an SFFF 2200 Sandforce controller and it
also upgrades the interface to SATA 3 6
GB per second. So the one I have here
today is in an anti-static bag. Comes
packed in a foam thing like this. The retail drives probably come with a 2 and
1/2 to 3 and 1/2 in adapter, but this one is clearly a bit too early of a
sample for such nicities to be included.
The drive itself will come with Vertex 3 branding on the top of it, but you can
clearly see here that this is just a plain black drive with a silver bottom.
This is a 240 gig version, although the
drive is available in 120, 240, and 480
gig configurations. Now, the 480 gig at the time of filming is not really a uh
compelling value at just over $1,600 or
maybe it's like $1,800 retail. It's very very high. It's far more than double the
price of a 240. Whereas a 240 is approximately double the price of a 120.
And so it should be. And a 120 is approximately double the price of a
another 60 gig on the market plus a premium for the advanced controller that
goes into this. So the Vertex 3 uses
updated 25 nanometer flash. It uses, as
I mentioned before, an SFF 2200 controller. It uses a SATA 3 interface.
So, if you want to come and have a closer look at the interface here,
there's your SATA power and there's your SATA 3 interface, which looks exactly
like SATA 2 because all of the changes
that have gone on are actually on this side of the interface rather than on the
connector themselves. You've got all of your standard mounting holes. So, you've
got your sides here as well as your bottom mounting holes. So, that means
you'll be able to mount this in pretty much any laptop as long as it doesn't
take a very small 1.8 8 in SSD or if it
has non-standard mounting, which is very, very rare. So, pretty much will
fit in any laptop and with an adapter, it'll fit in pretty much any desktop.
Uh, in terms of other changes, OCZ,
well, okay, let's let's talk about things that aren't changes. So, it still supports trim, which means that if
you're running the Windows 7 OS, it will automatically clean up any deleted data
and optimize it so that you're not going to experience any slowdown as the SSD
gets into a what is called a used state.
Okay, so it does feature trim and it is also fully RAID capable. Now, this is
something that pretty much everyone puts on their SSD packaging and it's always
been a little bit confusing to me, but RAID capable. I'm going to come have a
come look at the drive for a little bit. RAID capable basically just means SSDs
perform extremely well in RAID, which has been true since day one and will
likely remain true. It uses MLC flash,
which is not as um durable as SLC flash,
but should still be just fine for consumer level use. And it has a as
speaking of consumer level use, it comes with a three-year warranty and it has a meantime between failure of 2 million
hours. Okay, so like we've seen with
previous generations of SSDs, the specs are actually slightly different for the
different capacities. So the 240 gig has a max read of 550 megs, a max right of
520 megs per second, and random right at
4 kilobyte. This is aligned of 60,000 IOPS. The 120 gig is slightly slower
rights at only 500 megabytes per second. And the 480 gig is actually
significantly slower with only 530
megabytes per second read, 450 megabytes per second, right, and random right 4K
IOPS of only 40,000. So the IOPS are actually the same for the 120 and the
240 gig drive. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Vertex 3240.
Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and
other computer videos. Can't wait to try this guy out.