Last year, OCZ was the first vendor to mass market affordable, high-capacity solid state disks with its Core Series. While those drives ushered in an age of affordable SSDs, a huge price gap continued between value-priced SSDs that offer middling performance and high-priced, high-speed models. With its Vertex series, OCZ bridged that gap, offering top-notch read and write rates at a relatively affordable price.
When we first tested the Vertex in May 2009, we gave it our Editor's Choice award, based on its ground-breaking performance, performance which blew away even the legendary Intel X25-M. Since then, OCZ has issued several firmware updates to increase the speed of its drive, but slew of competitors have stepped up their game, releasing their own affordable high-speed SSDs, many of which are based on the same controller chip. Though the race is tight, the Vertex remains our leading choice, because of its strong combination of performance, value, and support.
Editor's Note - 7/29/09: This review was updated to reflect a new round of testing that was conducted in July 2009, pitting the Vertex (with updated firmware) against a new series of competitors.
Design and Form Factor
The OCZ Vertex comes in a standard 2.5-inch form factor and uses a standard SATA interface. Most notebooks made in the past couple of years support drives of this size and come with SATA ports. However, some ultraportable and thin-and-light systems such as the Lenovo ThinkPad T400s use smaller 1.8-inch drives; before you upgrade, be sure to check your manual.
You won’t spend a lot of time staring at an SSD, so the way its casing looks isn’t critical. Still, when you plunk down hundreds of dollars on a drive, you want it to look sturdy. The drive's plain black metal case, adorned with a Vertex sticker, is not very attractive, but at least appears solid.
*Capacity Note: Though the Vertex is labeled and marketed as 120GB, it's actually got 128GB worth of memory. Unlike most storage vendors, OCZ lists only the amount of drive space that is visible under Windows.
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