OCZ Technology Vertex 3 120GB Retail Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

We plan to see a huge number of SandForce 2000 Series SSDs this year. SandForce has added even more partners in 2011, Intel being one of them. Even though Big Blue will take a shot at fame with a SandForce 2000 Series product, the Vertex 3 will still be the benchmark in which all others are compared. OCZ has dominated the consumer SSD market for the last several years and transitioned from a company making several products into a company whose primary role is solid state drives.

Keeping with tradition, OCZ dedicated itself to get the first enterprise and consumer SandForce 2000 Series products on the market. We first saw a working sample in January at CES and even had a Vertex 3 240GB drive in our hands when other companies were still talking about a strategy. When you are talking about solid state products you have to include OCZ Technology in the conversation.

The Vertex 3 is OCZ's newest SSD product line and is capable of sequential transfer speeds in excess of 500 MB/s read and write. Last month we tested a preproduction 240GB drive with early programming and firmware. On the surface everything seemed great, but a few firmware bugs let us know that the Vertex 3 wasn't ready for consumer use. That is all in the past now; the Vertex 3 is now sporting RC1 firmware and so far there are no known issues with this firmware. Eventually we will see MP firmware, but at this time there really isn't any need and that little TRIM issue we found is long gone.

Let's get this show on the road and move onto the full specification list before we dive in.