Verdict and Conclusion
OCZ’s latest crack at the SSD market has impressed me.
It starts with the $115 price tag, that’s a good price for 128GB. You can find 120GB drives (from OCZ even) for a bit less (~$100-$105) or a goodly amount less with mail in rebates, but I’ve never liked mail in rebates.
The only real competition comes from OCZ itself with the Vertex 3 120GB and PNY with their SandForce drive (essentially identical to the V3 120GB). That drive gives better peak speeds in ATTO but looses pretty much everywhere else and doesn’t shuffle the small files as fast.
OCZ’s decision to include a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket is a good one, I’d prefer the SSD to be centered in the bracket, but that is a minor complaint.
The performance is excellent, the more real-worldish the benchmark the better the drive does. The use of half a gigabyte of DDR3 cache has clearly helped write speeds a lot.
The performance doesn’t quite live up to the spec. To be fair to the drive I’m not sure it even can live up to the spec, SATA3 6Gbps doesn’t allow 560MB/s of bandwidth to the best of my knowledge. Unless of course your megabytes are only 1,000,000 bytes rather than 1,048,576 bytes. Mine aren’t. It does get close on read speeds, and decently close on write speeds. The extremely fast ramp-up of write speeds in small file sizes helps offset this a bit.
Naturally it is completely silent, it also runs cooler than the previous generations of drives thanks to ~17% lower power consumption.
In short we have plenty of pros:
- Very fast, especially with small files.
- Best AS SSD results we’ve ever seen.
- Good price.
- Comes with a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adaptor.
- 8GB more space than the previous generation.
There is a limited selection of cons too:
- Offset mounting on the 2.5″ to 3.5″ adaptor doesn’t look as nice as centered would.
- Doesn’t quite manage to speeds the box says it will.
- Mail In Rebates on older drives make them significantly cheaper. If you like MIRs.
All told I am quite pleased with the OCZ Vertex 4 128GB and give it a 9.5/10 rating. OCZ continues to impress me with their SSDs!
SCORE
9.5/10
