OCZ Vertex 460 240GB SSD Review

Today we are taking a look at the OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Solid State Drive, the first product we have reviewed since the Toshiba acquisition. The Vertex 460 240GB is currently on offer from Amazon for £147.82 inc vat so we will find out if it is a good purchase for an upcoming system build. It has been difficult in recent months to miss the OCZ bankruptcy news, however the Toshiba acquisition does bode well for the future. With Toshiba able to supply high grade NAND it should make the process of future product development as quick and painless as possible. That said, OCZ are going to continue to operate as a separate entity under the Toshiba umbrella, so we will continue calling them OCZ. OCZ are selling three versions of this drive, in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. IOPS performance on all drives is rated highly, with the 240GB and 480GB models claiming a marginal edge over the smaller 120GB version. Additionally, maximum rated write performance is higher on the larger drives, up from 420 MB/s to 525 MB/s. The Vertex 460 warranty is rated at 3 years, which works out at 20GB writes a day. Business as usual for OCZ, the Vertex 460 240GB ships in a small black box similar to previous designs from the company. The bundle includes mounting screws, literature on the product, an 'I love my SSD' sticker and a 3.5 inch drive mount. They also give a serial key and download link for the excellent Acronis cloning software package. The Vertex 460 240GB ships in a metal chassis which is 7mm deep - ideal for fitting into an ultraportable laptop. Opening the chassis invalidates the warranty, so please don't do this if you have one of these drives at home, that is why we are here. The Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller is covered by a thermal pad, highlighting the fact that the metal chassis acts as a heatsink. The Vertex 460 PCB is loaded with 16 NAND chips (16x16GB), 2 DRAM chips and the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller. This is the same controller than was used on the Vertex 450. The drive is configured with 7% over provisioning to give a final figure of 240GB. Obviously the new drive is using Toshiba NAND - 19nm Toshiba Toggle Mode MLC, to be precise. OCZ are using two Micron DDR3-1333mhz 1.5v chips for the DRAM buffer. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Kitguru Test Rig 2 Compare system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Other Drives Samsung 840 EVO 1TB OCZ Vector 150 240GB ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB Visiontek Racer Series 120GB Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB OCZ Vertex 4 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update) Transcend SSD720 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw) Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB ADATA S511 240GB Intel 510 120GB Corsair F100 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCIe drives test system: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD & OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 8 IOMeter All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64. 4K QD32 performance is very strong, averaging close to the top of our chart, and just below the Vertex 4 512GB drive. This is a good result if you regularly deal with incompressible data transfers. The controller is able to deal with compressible data at the same level as incompressible. Very strong results all around. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The drive scores very well in this benchmark, pretty much at the limit of the SATA 3 interface. Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. AS SSD only deals with incompressible data which highlights the strengths of the Indilinx controller inside the Vertex 460. As expected, the drive scores almost identically to the Vertex 450 256GB which we reviewed some time ago. Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months. PCMark 8 is the latest version in our popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. A good overall score from the OCZ Vertex 460 240GB drive, scoring just under 5,000 points. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. Our results are very close to the official OCZ claims, just falling a little behind in both 4K random read and write tests. The OCZ Vertex 460 240GB is a competitively priced product which slots in on a performance level beside their Vertex 450. Obviously, since the Toshiba acquisition the shift from IMFT NAND to 19nm Toshiba Toggle Mode MLC was inevitable. The OCZ Vertex series of drives have earned a reputation over the years for delivering class leading levels of performance and this will be reinforced with the introduction of the Vertex 460. In ATTO testing the drive peaked at 550MB/s read and 530 MB/s write and the strengths of the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 with both compressible and incompressible data is evident. IOPS performance is also impressive, scoring between 80,000 and 90,000. OCZ deserve some credit for overprovisioning the Vertex 460 by 14 percent. This may reduce the overall capacity a little, but it will ensure that the Vertex 460 will deliver consistent, steady results over a longer period of time. Right now you can buy the Vertex 240GB Solid State Drive on offer from Amazon in the United Kingdom for £147.82 inc vat. We feel this drive is an excellent purchase, although there are a handful of other drives available for roughly the same money which also deserve some consideration. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: Strong overall performance from the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller. competitive pricing. 7mm height is useful. bundled software. Cons: Isn't a class leading drive in any single area. KitGuru says: Another great drive from the OCZ team, this time equipped with Toshiba NAND.