OCZ Vertex 3 Sandforce SF-2281 SSD Solid State Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
925 words · ~4 min read
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This does not come in a retail box, although it will for you. This is the
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OCZ Vertex 3. So, this is a very, very
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exciting product because it comes as a
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successor and as a worthy successor to the Vertex 2, which has pretty much
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dominated the SSD market for the past
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considerable amount of time.
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So with the Vertex one, OCZ had competitors that were like competing
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controllers that were not Indelinks, which was used by OCZ as well as a
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number of others at the time uh out on the market such as in uh Intel uh where
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performance was not necessarily the strongest argument for getting a Vertex
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1, especially later on in the life cycle. With the Vertex 2, there hasn't
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been that much that's been close or beated in terms of performance and but
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but it was still a pretty close race. You had competitors like the Crucial
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C300 that were pretty close largely in
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part largely in part largely due to the
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fact that they used a SATA 36 Gbit per second control um interface. So the
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Vertex 3 changes all that. It gives us a
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new sandforce controller. This is an SFFF 2200 Sandforce controller and it
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also upgrades the interface to SATA 3 6
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GB per second. So the one I have here
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today is in an anti-static bag. Comes
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packed in a foam thing like this. The retail drives probably come with a 2 and
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1/2 to 3 and 1/2 in adapter, but this one is clearly a bit too early of a
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sample for such nicities to be included.
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The drive itself will come with Vertex 3 branding on the top of it, but you can
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clearly see here that this is just a plain black drive with a silver bottom.
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This is a 240 gig version, although the
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drive is available in 120, 240, and 480
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gig configurations. Now, the 480 gig at the time of filming is not really a uh
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compelling value at just over $1,600 or
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maybe it's like $1,800 retail. It's very very high. It's far more than double the
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price of a 240. Whereas a 240 is approximately double the price of a 120.
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And so it should be. And a 120 is approximately double the price of a
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another 60 gig on the market plus a premium for the advanced controller that
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goes into this. So the Vertex 3 uses
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updated 25 nanometer flash. It uses, as
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I mentioned before, an SFF 2200 controller. It uses a SATA 3 interface.
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So, if you want to come and have a closer look at the interface here,
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there's your SATA power and there's your SATA 3 interface, which looks exactly
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like SATA 2 because all of the changes
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that have gone on are actually on this side of the interface rather than on the
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connector themselves. You've got all of your standard mounting holes. So, you've
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got your sides here as well as your bottom mounting holes. So, that means
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you'll be able to mount this in pretty much any laptop as long as it doesn't
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take a very small 1.8 8 in SSD or if it
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has non-standard mounting, which is very, very rare. So, pretty much will
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fit in any laptop and with an adapter, it'll fit in pretty much any desktop.
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Uh, in terms of other changes, OCZ,
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well, okay, let's let's talk about things that aren't changes. So, it still supports trim, which means that if
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you're running the Windows 7 OS, it will automatically clean up any deleted data
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and optimize it so that you're not going to experience any slowdown as the SSD
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gets into a what is called a used state.
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Okay, so it does feature trim and it is also fully RAID capable. Now, this is
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something that pretty much everyone puts on their SSD packaging and it's always
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been a little bit confusing to me, but RAID capable. I'm going to come have a
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come look at the drive for a little bit. RAID capable basically just means SSDs
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perform extremely well in RAID, which has been true since day one and will
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likely remain true. It uses MLC flash,
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which is not as um durable as SLC flash,
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but should still be just fine for consumer level use. And it has a as
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speaking of consumer level use, it comes with a three-year warranty and it has a meantime between failure of 2 million
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hours. Okay, so like we've seen with
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previous generations of SSDs, the specs are actually slightly different for the
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different capacities. So the 240 gig has a max read of 550 megs, a max right of
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520 megs per second, and random right at
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4 kilobyte. This is aligned of 60,000 IOPS. The 120 gig is slightly slower
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rights at only 500 megabytes per second. And the 480 gig is actually
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significantly slower with only 530
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megabytes per second read, 450 megabytes per second, right, and random right 4K
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IOPS of only 40,000. So the IOPS are actually the same for the 120 and the
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240 gig drive. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Vertex 3240.
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Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and
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other computer videos. Can't wait to try this guy out.