OCZ have a lot riding on their new Vertex 450 SSD, and it scores very closely to the market leading Vector drive which we tested late last year. OCZ have clearly been tweaking their latest firmware, showing excellent all round performance in both incompressible and compressible tests.
It would be difficult to say anyone would be disappointed with the capabilities of this drive, it delivers close to class leading performance and is very stable, without the little dips in performance we see from many drives on occasion during intensive stress tests.
These latest releases highlight that OCZ made the right move shifting focus from Sandforce 2281 and adopting their own Indilinx based controllers to power future drives. Vertex 450 read and write performance was well above 500 MB/s with both compressible and incompressible data and 4k throughput was right at the top of the chart.
Some people on our Facebook page say that they have a problem trusting OCZ now after the Sandforce problems that affected many manufacturers, however we have yet to read any concerns in relation to the Barefoot 3 controller. OCZ back this drive with a 3 year warranty, for peace of mind. This may be 2 years less than the Vector, but it is still good especially as they also offer a range of software tools to keep the drive working at maximum efficiency.
UK pricing for the 256GB Vertex 450 has just been announced at SCAN – who are taking pre-orders for £197.10 inc vat. This is around £40 less than the 256GB Vector drive. The Vertex 450 certainly offers a lot of performance for the price.
Pros:
- fantastic sequential performance.
- equally strong with incompressible and compressible data.
- 4k IOPS performance is very strong.
Cons:
- A lot of competition from the likes of Samsung.
Kitguru says: Excellent all round performance and another high point for OCZ this year.
An excellent drive, ive been waiting on one for a while now. still not stock here!
They need to lower the price a little more I think against Samsung drives to get more market share. I know a lot of people just look at the best price and buy based on that.
I would have a problem trusting OCZ. I had 2 of their sandforce powered drives fail, luckily OCUK replaced them for me, but they tend to rush things out before completely checking them. just my 2 cents
Agreed that some of them were faulty, But It is not ethical to target the controllers and we need to change the perception that all drives having SF controller would fail.