Specifications, Pricing and Availability

For this launch OCZ will have three Vertex 4 models available that vary by capacity. The performance also scales as capacity increases. We hacked together a performance by capacity chart from the promotional material that arrived last week. At the time of writing Vertex 4 was not listed on OCZ's website so we'll toss out there that these numbers could and most likely will change over the lifespan of the drive. We say this because as firmware matures, the products tend to get faster.

Our 256GB and 512GB Vertex 4 samples shipped to us with 25nm Intel synchronous flash. There are sixteen NAND flash chips in total, eight on each side of the PCB. The 256GB drive has a 512MB cache buffer on board and the 512GB drive has a massive 1GB cache buffer on board.

In an article we published at the same time as this one we disclosed every single detail we know about the new Indilinx Everest 2 controller. We'll go over some of the finer details here briefly and then get into what you really want to see anyhow, the performance.

Being a high-performance drive under the flagship Vertex banner, the Vertex 4 needs to be fast. At this time it doesn't get any faster than SATA 3.0 on the client side. OCZ is utilizing their new Ndurance 2.0 technology that has several buzzwords attached to it.

You'll see today that Vertex 4 is all about high IOPS. The whole system is one massive IOPS producing monster. At peak Vertex 4 can reach around 120,000 IOPS - that is much higher than anything we've seen in a single 2.5" form factor. As you know though, reviewing computer hardware isn't so much about what they tell you, it's what they don't tell you that you have to find. We'll get into that throughout the article, though.

OCZ is claiming to have superior 'Real World' performance through their incredible IOPS. Measuring real-world is always an objective task because what I do on my computer might be foreign to you. OCZ says their Vertex 4 is much more consumer friendly when compared to Vertex 3 (which is really saying SandForce based drives) because Vertex 4 doesn't distinguish between compressible and incompressible data. This is good news for those who work with small file size media, like JPEGs and MP3s.

OCZ included a new five year warranty with the Vertex 4. This is a step up from their Vertex 3 line by two years. Also included with each Vertex 4 is a desktop adapter bracket, paper installation guide and a "My SSD is Faster than Your HDD" sticker.

If you are a budget minded shopper this is where things get interesting. The prices were quoted to us in a press kit and are MSRP so we can't tell you what Newegg or other e-tail stores will start the prices at. Our best educated guess is they will be a little higher than the MSRP for at least the first two weeks and then we'll start to see a decline.

The 128GB model is a little lower than the current Vertex 3 price at Newegg at the time of writing. The 256GB size is just a little higher which we don't like because this is the capacity size most will look to purchase. The Vertex 4 512GB size costs much less than the 480GB Vertex 3 at Newegg. You could actually buy a Vertex 4 512GB and a Vertex 4 256GB for less than a Vertex 3 480GB.

When comparing the MSRP prices to the current Vertex 3 MaxIOPS premium models, the Vertex 4 comes out ahead every time and by a sizable margin.