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The box front has a good clear image of the Toshiba OCZ VX500 drive and a very small drive capacity label which can be quite hard to make out under certain angles. The rear of the box carries a panel listing some of the drive's features and a multilingual panel highlighting where to get more detailed product and warranty information.
The only items in the box, aside from the drive, are a small multi-language manual and a download voucher for Acronis True Image HD cloning software, which is a welcome addition.
The VX500 is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm-thick format and is encased in a lightweight metal enclosure held together by four screws recessed into the top of the drive. Unusually for a consumer SSD of today, the eight NAND chips and the controller have individual thermal pads on them to help dissipate heat.
All of the drive's components are built onto one side of the PCB. At the heart of the drive is a Toshiba TC358790XBG controller – a component that Toshiba has used in a number of drives in both consumer and enterprise product lines.
In the case of the 512GB unit, the controller looks after the eight 64GB Toshiba (TH58TFG9DFLBA8C) A15 15nm MLC NAND packages that make up the drive's capacity.
The SSD management software is called SSD Utility. While the name might be a bit bland the software has some useful features. Dashboard is the main page and shows drive capacity and how it's being used, firmware information, a readout from the drive's temperature sensor and the drive's health.
There's also a built-in performance benchmark, the ability to securely erase the drive, update the firmware and to set the over-provisioning level.
Great review thanks!
Seems like a decent drive, does make me wonder if they are going to continue the old Vector (VT) line and try and claw back some of the high end consumer market segment.
This seems like a very safe, solid drive and that should’t be an issue. But for better or worse OCZ was always a fairly avant guarde, forward looking company. This drive feels like a tweaked rebaged of the Q300, is this what OCZ has become?
What happened to Barefoot 3 and Indilinx controllers, sure they lacked low power sates, but it rivalled the might of Samsung for years! I was really hoping to see an evolution of this tech. Hell maybe it (The IP) has been incorporated into the new Toshiba Controllers and we would never know. But the new Tosh drives seem to behave so different in the benchmarks I doubt it.
I guess I was just hoping for something a little different from OCZ, in a very very similar and saturated SSD Market. For better or worse they always had an interesting product line up…