Welcome to another SSD unboxing. This one is actually particularly exciting.
This is OCZ's Vertex 4. So, if you're
familiar with OCZ's nomenclature for their drives, you'll know that as far as
the consumer space goes, Vert.Ex is
their branding for what they consider to be their top tier, best they can
deliver, top product line. So, the
original Vertex used an Indelinks barefoot controller and that was when
OCZ and Ind were both still separate companies. The second generation Vertex
used the first generation Sanforce controller which at the time delivered
previously unheard of performance due to
the way that it compressed the data before it wrote it to the flash allowing
you to basically get more more mileage for your dollar in terms of the actual
speed of the flash itself due to controller voodoo magic. than the
Vert.ex 3, which is still a current product and still going, is using a
second generation sandforce controller, a SATA 36 Gbit per second force
controller. And this right here is the
second product we've seen from OCZ that takes advantage of their new
relationship with Ind. So that is the original Vertex one was Indelinks and
now we've come full circle again back to Ind. The difference is this time OCZ is
the owner of Ind has developed the
controller for this chip in-house since the acquisition for Indelinks and is so
proud of their creation that they are putting their Vertex branding as well as
a 5-year warranty behind this product. And I apologize guys in advance for the
uh for the backdrop here which happens to be my system that I'm working on but
it was too heavy to move. So it is what it is. So, what does OCZ have to say for
themselves? High performance design? Yeah, that's for sure. As far as real
world performance benchmarks go, it's
pretty much up there. It's either a top performer or the top performer. In some
synthetic benchmarks, it doesn't do quite as well, but at the end of the
day, I use my drives in the real world.
I don't know about you. MLC flash memory is hardly a selling point. Everyone's
using MLC flash memory these days. Includes an SSD adapter. That's good to
have. SATA 3 6 Gbit per second. H, which
is pretty much the limiting factor for the performance of this drive due to a
couple of the a couple of the performance enhancements they've made,
including a huge RAM cache that allows it to basically max out the SATA 36 Gbit
per second uh interface whenever it's
able to use it. Trim support, once again, it better be. And a really cool
thing about the fact that it has trim support is also compared to the Octane
which was the first Indelinkx infused OCZ product since the uh since the
acquisition um non-trim support is also
significantly better compared to that first generation Everest product. So
this is Everest 2 in terms of the controller and it not only supports trim
but also performs much better without trim into links infused. So that means
it has an Indelink controller as opposed to the sandforce controllers that not
only OCZ has access to but everyone else in their dog has access to. This is
their own thing. So was designed and built with unparalleled performance, reliability and endurance in mind. So
reliability and endurance is something that they're very very serious about on
this product. Not only are they throwing the 5-year warranty on it, but they're
also building in a lot more advanced features such as and I totally have
notes over there. No, don't look over there. Those are my notes. Okay, just a
sec. So, the features that OCZ is building in to justify that warranty are
things like very low right amplification compared to previous generation
products, which means that when especially when the drive is in a more
used state and it has to move things around before it can write to it. It is
doing less wasting of the I mean, let's
face it, few limited write cycles that are available on the nan flash that it's
using. So, that's going to make it last longer. Also, it's ready for upcoming
generations of NAND flash because it supports much more robust error
correction than previous generation products, which allows it to as we
shrink the processes for the NAND uh the NAND flash that's on these drives, they
become inherently less accurate and less reliable. So, we will be able to
compensate for that with an advanced controller like this one, which may not
seem relevant today, but if you're an engineer at OCZ or any other SSD
company, you had better be concerned about that, especially if you're going
to bring a product to market and expect it to last for a long time. Now,
speaking of lasting for a long time, performance is very good today, but I
would definitely expect it to continue to improve because we are still very
early on in the firmware of this drive. And even the last generation Everest
product, Octane, got a significant performance boost with firmware well
after the initial launch. So, inside the box, we get a my SSD is faster than your
hard drive sticker. We get an OCZ
warranty and installation guide
book. Sweet. All right. We get a 2 and
1/2 in to 3 and 1/2 in OCZ adapter made
of metal, which is good.
And we get some mounting screws. And
finally, the Vertex 4 2.5 in solidstate
drive. And what could be what could be sexier than putting it next to this GTX
590 classified so you can enjoy both of them
together. Pretty sweet, hey. So,
consistent performance across all workloads is a is a trait that both
Everest controllers share. Now what that means is compared to Sanforce where if
you're copying a large file that happens to be like a raar file or a sevenzip
file an already compressed file it will tend to be significantly slower because
Sanforce deresides a lot of its performance by compressing data on the
fly and you can't really compress much further data that's already been
compressed whereas Everest gets the same performance regardless of whether you're
working with compressible or non-compressible data. It supports AES
256 encryption, which is a feature that
is useful if you encrypt your drive. Personally, I don't work with encryption
on my desktop, so I'm not too worried about it. It also has absolutely wicked
4K random read and write performance, as well as outstanding write performance.
Once again, especially with incompressible data. When it comes to incompressible data, this drive is
pretty much untouchable. the higher cap
drives as with many other drives. I don't know if you guys have checked out this video on my NCIXCOM channel, but if
you do, I do mention this many times. Higher capacity drives tend to perform
better than lower capacity versions using the same architecture. Whether
it's because there are more channels to write to uh in parallel or read from in
parallel, giving it just a sheer bandwidth advantage, or whether there
are other architecture tweaks, that just tends to be the case. So this is a 256
gig drive which will perform slightly less than the 512 gig drive and slightly
better than the 128 gig drive. So you do get more value for buying a higher
capacity besides just the additional capacity. And right now 120 gig is sort
of the sweet spot, but more and more people are deciding to go with 256 gig
drives as well. So you can come in and have a close look at it physically,
although I don't expect you're going to notice much of note. Um the sticker is
on crooked on this one. So maybe that's because it's a media sample, but you
know, that's probably the kind of thing that I would correct cuz I'm OCD like
that. In terms of mounting holes, you see your usual mounting holes. So yes,
it can be mounted either in a desktop or in a notebook. Got your four on the
bottom. You got your sticker showing the serial number. You got your warranty
void if removed OCZ sticker. You've got your standard SATA 36 GB per second data
port as well as your SATA power connector. And other than that, in terms
of the physicality of it, yeah, there's nothing special, but it's what's under
the hood that makes this drive special. Maybe it's not the same kind of a
generational performance leap like we saw from Vert.ex one to Vertex 2 or from
2 to three, but what this is is it's finally something that OCZ has 100%
control over. I mean, yeah, there were the blue screen issues with the early
earlier Sandforce drives that OCZ took the brunt of the flack for because they
were the ones shipping most of the drives. Well, now they're no longer
relying on a third party company in order to support them. So, this is one
of the first products where we see how well they are going to deliver when they
actually fully control all aspects of the execution of this drive. So, I'm
very excited to see how the general public accepts this particular product.
Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look.