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OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx?

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  • SSD
  • OCZ
  • Vertex
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April 4, 2012 1:00:04 PM

OCZ breaks new ground with its Vertex 4 in that this isn't a SandForce-flavored SSD. The company's latest flagship features an Indilinx Everest 2 controller that definitely impresses us. Can Vertex 4 stand up against the SSD 520, m4, and Samsung 830?

OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx? : Read more

More about : ocz vertex review flagship ssd powered indilinx

April 4, 2012 1:42:23 PM

Octane was not a special and unique snowflake; Indeed, someone else's fingerprints were all over it. Vertex4 is certainly unique, but I fully expect the next round of drive launches using Marvell products to look like the V4, but possibly with some more balance.
Score
5
April 4, 2012 1:45:09 PM

Seems to good to be true.

We'll see how they are once they've been out in the open for 6 months when problems will/will not flare up.
Score
7
Related resources
April 4, 2012 2:00:10 PM

As Billy said only time will tell. These preliminary tests are great and pricing is better but still SSD are expensive...we need to get to cents not dollars per GB. Anyway good start OCZ...now the only thing you need is your own NANDs...perhaps in few years
Score
0
April 4, 2012 2:19:06 PM

This is a great step and makes financial sense for OCZ to come to market with a competitive product and possibly undercut all the others. Its a no brainer im my world. Force Samsung to sell units with less profit margins
Score
3
April 4, 2012 2:31:19 PM

it'll be interesting to see how reliable these drives are and what their failure rate is going to be. OCZ's vertex 2 and 3 drives were horribly unreliable - in my experience 50% failure/DOA rate, my local shop said they see about 10% of them returned due to failure (and that's just within their 2 week return window alone).

sorry OCZ, you've lost my business this time around. i've since replaced all my remaining OCZ SSD's with crucial m4's, they may not quite perform as well as your latest offerings but in my experience reliability > performance.
Score
8
April 4, 2012 2:40:48 PM

When I built Son No.2 's box, we installed the Seagate Barracuda XT on Friday and measured boot times at 21.2 seconds to the Password entry screen. The Vertex 3 arrived on Monday and after installing that, we measured boot times at 15.6 seconds. Not commenting on the actual times as differences in hardware as well as testing parameters could push it in any direction, but what I will comment on is the HD choice for this test.

My testing showed it took 36% extra time to boot off the HD instead of the HD. This test has it taking 226 % longer. If we're gonna test the best SSD's, I'd sure like to see a best in class HD added to the comparisons.
Score
3
April 4, 2012 2:56:36 PM

Brandenit'll be interesting to see how reliable these drives are and what their failure rate is going to be. OCZ's vertex 2 and 3 drives were horribly unreliable - in my experience 50% failure/DOA rate, my local shop said they see about 10% of them returned due to failure (and that's just within their 2 week return window alone).sorry OCZ, you've lost my business this time around. i've since replaced all my remaining OCZ SSD's with crucial m4's, they may not quite perform as well as your latest offerings but in my experience reliability > performance.

It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Score
3
April 4, 2012 3:00:58 PM

all I read was: support for 2TB... *drooling*
Price for 2TB SSD?
*not drooling anymore*
Score
5
April 4, 2012 4:33:40 PM

Hmmm. Basically OCZ decided "Indilinx too slow! sod it, stick 1GB buffer in there!"
Score
-4
April 4, 2012 5:26:47 PM

I love my vertex 2. I'm looking forward to seeing what ocz comes out with next!
Score
1
April 4, 2012 5:27:18 PM

I'd have like to see the 520 included in the benchmarks rather than the 320. Yeah it's higher priced but it's also the most reliable ssd on the market.
Score
1
April 4, 2012 6:22:49 PM

JackNaylorPEWhen I built Son No.2 's box...

You lucky dog! I wanted a similar naming system of "son 1, 2, 3" and "daughter 1, 2, 3" or even "Thing 1, 2, 3" but my wife would not let me :p 
burnley14It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.

I completely agree, got a 60GB Solid 3 for my wife's PC about a year ago, and just picked up a much larger 240GB Agility 3 for myself. I have also put them in a few PCs for friends and have yet to have a single issue. I think a lot of the bad rap they got was due to bad firmwares that caused any number of issues, but after the last major update last summer I have not been hearing the same complaints.

Also, are those boot times including POST? because my system boots in 9-10 sec after post, which is half the time of these scores and I don't even have a 'performance' SSD
Score
10
April 4, 2012 7:09:21 PM

Looks nice but ill stick with a 120 second gen
Score
-1
April 4, 2012 8:56:39 PM

Outstanding IOPS!

We really need SATA Express yesterday...SATA3 is saturated.
Score
0
April 4, 2012 8:57:39 PM

How many 7200 RPM hard drives would it take to match OCZ's SSD? Seek time is out for sure, unless if a HDD manufacturer drops a 60k RPM HDD on the market.
Score
2
April 4, 2012 9:02:44 PM

CaedenV said:
You lucky dog! I wanted a similar naming system of "son 1, 2, 3" and "daughter 1, 2, 3" or even "Thing 1, 2, 3" but my wife would not let me :p 

I completely agree, got a 60GB Solid 3 for my wife's PC about a year ago, and just picked up a much larger 240GB Agility 3 for myself. I have also put them in a few PCs for friends and have yet to have a single issue. I think a lot of the bad rap they got was due to bad firmwares that caused any number of issues, but after the last major update last summer I have not been hearing the same complaints.

Also, are those boot times including POST? because my system boots in 9-10 sec after post, which is half the time of these scores and I don't even have a 'performance' SSD

From the time you hit the power button to desktop.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Score
3
April 4, 2012 9:04:19 PM

iamtheking123 said:
I'd have like to see the 520 included in the benchmarks rather than the 320. Yeah it's higher priced but it's also the most reliable ssd on the market.


See our SSD 520 review. Basically same scores as Vertex 3 because they are both SandForce.
Score
2
April 4, 2012 9:05:02 PM

billybobser said:
Seems to good to be true.

We'll see how they are once they've been out in the open for 6 months when problems will/will not flare up.


Agreed!

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
Score
3
April 4, 2012 9:24:20 PM

HDs are here to stay for affordable mass storage for a few more years but SSDs are definitely getting to the point where you don't have a reason to NOT using one as a boot/system drive.

How long until boxed PCs like Dell or HP will be offered with an affordable SSD/HD combo ?
Score
0
April 4, 2012 9:44:23 PM

I am not a big SSD fan, but strangely, Vertex 3 seems 1.5 times faster at writes in comparison to vertex 4. Whats up with that? :-/
Score
1
April 4, 2012 11:51:04 PM

My Vertex 2 died completely within a month and a half of installing in a new laptop - many users on-line experiencing the same problem with those drives, disgusting to encounter such a catastrophic fault rate in a system-critical product really.

Purchased a (then more expensive) Crucial M4 to replace it, and have been very happy with it ever since. Glad to see it still benchmarks very consistently across the board, and they're even cheaper now in the UK... I think I'll buy another for a gaming rig that I'm planning.
Score
0
April 5, 2012 12:36:15 AM

soldier37Try using a better cpu next time like a 2700k. Have mine overclocked to 5Ghz on liquid stable, the i5 is for the poor..


I highly doubt that I'm the only person that is tired of seeing you troll about your elitism and epeen. Sandy Bridge i5s are NOT poor man's CPUs, they are equivalent to the SB i7s for gaming and everything that isn't able to use more than four threads well. Not everyone can afford a setup with the most expensive LGA 1155 consumer CPU and multiple GTX 580 3GBs (you said that you have more than one 580 3GB on more than one article's comments section) and even if they could, it would not make a difference for these tests. SATA SSDs don't run faster from having more CPU threads and CPU cache (the only two differences between the i5s and i7s besides slightly better binning).

The i5 is for people who don't want to waste their money on i7s that they could never use well enough to be worth the money unless they have software that uses 8 threads and they must have the fairly moderate performance boost in said software. Considering how you act, I have to assume that you are simply a rich gamer and don't do productivity work that actually uses the i7, so your i7 is actually not running any faster than the i5-2500K would for gaming.

Now on topic for the article, OCZ seems to be doing very well with their controller. It seems that if Sandforce doesn't do something to stay ahead, OCZ might overtake them in performance across the board instead only in some workloads. OCZ just needs to improve write speeds and power usage at idle. Oh, and reliability. I haven't bought an OCZ SSD yet, but I hear more bad things about reliability about them than I hear good things about their performance. However, the reliability problems are always about their Sandforce drives so far, so maybe they build their Indilinx based drives better.
Score
6
April 5, 2012 12:41:16 AM

ackuFrom the time you hit the power button to desktop.Cheers,Andrew KuTomsHardware.com

That would do it, thanks for the clarification.
Score
0
April 5, 2012 1:07:55 AM

gam0reilyI am not a big SSD fan, but strangely, Vertex 3 seems 1.5 times faster at writes in comparison to vertex 4. Whats up with that? :-/


Sandforce always was better on writes than other controllers with compressible data. Flash memory inherently reads faster than it writes, so being able to compress writes allows it to write a lot more data faster because it's actually writing less data than other controllers are for compressible data. With sandforce able to compress writes, it could let it's writes more or less keep up with read speeds when it was using compressible data.

Indilinx is also known to be kinda weak on writes. It's still at least a large step up from it's previous version in the Octanes. If OCZ continues making similar improvements this often, well it seems that Sandforce's days are numbered if it can't do something about this. If Indilinx can match Sandforce's compressible write transfer speeds even with non-compressible data, then Sandforce will be losing.
Score
1
April 5, 2012 2:03:58 AM

Good to see that horrible sandforce controller being replaced, hope the Indilux controller see's less failures in this new drive, nice also to see a price drop from this.
Score
0
April 5, 2012 3:48:22 AM

ackuFrom the time you hit the power button to desktop.Cheers,Andrew KuTomsHardware.com
I'd like to see those HDD benchmarks rerun. A 58.7 second boot time sounds pretty high for a drive that's supposedly fast like the WD Scorpio Blue. Should my Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB be significantly faster, because it is in my tests?
Score
0
April 5, 2012 3:51:16 AM

dalauderI'd like to see those HDD benchmarks rerun. A 58.7 second boot time sounds pretty high for a drive that's supposedly fast like the WD Scorpio Blue. Should my Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB be significantly faster, because it is in my tests?
To clarify, Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drives got 54 seconds on VISTA boot times at launch. I would expect significantly faster for Windows 7 and I'd expect something similar for a new Scorpio drive.
Score
0
April 5, 2012 12:30:56 PM

JackNaylorPEWhen I built Son No.2 's box, we installed the Seagate Barracuda XT on Friday and measured boot times at 21.2 seconds to the Password entry screen. The Vertex 3 arrived on Monday and after installing that, we measured boot times at 15.6 seconds. Not commenting on the actual times as differences in hardware as well as testing parameters could push it in any direction, but what I will comment on is the HD choice for this test.My testing showed it took 36% extra time to boot off the HD instead of the HD. This test has it taking 226 % longer. If we're gonna test the best SSD's, I'd sure like to see a best in class HD added to the comparisons.


they measure the time from post to the desktop. Stopping at the password screen doesn't make sense, because your programs and all load after you login.

i've got a 320 GB Caviar blue, i've measured 1 min 10 seconds after POST to reach the idle desktop on a 'stale' (couldn't think of a more suitable word!) windows 7 installation. So i think that 58 seconds would be typical for most people, if not one of the better scores. (again, password screen doesn't count :p )
Score
1
April 5, 2012 5:41:19 PM

^ 1 min 10 sec is fast
on my 5400 rpm notebook drive, to get a fully working desktop from power on took about 3 mins.
and even then the drive was at 100% work.
Score
0
April 5, 2012 5:42:55 PM

installing a Vertx 2 SSd on my corei3 370M CPU, i realized that a lot of my drives potential is being lost due to poor-ish single core performance.

i think that if i put the vertex2 on a SB setup, i can get moar benefit.
Score
-1
April 5, 2012 7:59:01 PM

mayankleoboy1installing a Vertx 2 SSd on my corei3 370M CPU, i realized that a lot of my drives potential is being lost due to poor-ish single core performance.i think that if i put the vertex2 on a SB setup, i can get moar benefit.


Disk drive performance has little to do with CPU performance and that CPU is not a single core and has very good single threaded and dual threaded performance regardless. It's a hell of a lot better than any core 2 or Phenom II based laptop CPU in that regard. It also has decent quad threaded performance (I think that all i3s are dual core CPUs with Hyper-Threading Technology, but just to be sure I even looked it up on Intel's site and confirmed that the i3-370M has two Hyper-Threaded cores).

Basically, no, you wouldn't get more benefit from a faster CPU.
Score
2
April 5, 2012 10:36:01 PM

This is the first SSD release in a while that's made me sit up. Better performance and lowewr price, it's not a secret to make the sale. Idle power isn't a personal breaker when we are talking 1 watt that for me equals little more than a $1.
I want to see these things in the wild, without retailers actually marking them up to move old inventory.
Score
3
April 6, 2012 8:54:59 AM

I'm glad to see some healthy competition in the SSD market. This is something we all need.
Score
1
April 6, 2012 11:15:23 AM

With SSDs I want to know two things first:
1. If I store data on it, will I get the data back consistently for at least 5 years?
2. If there is a powerfluctuation during a write-cycle, will it consistently store the data?

That means in any review of SSDs, the first thing I am going to look for is how it handles voltage fluctuations.

I don't see that here.

Who cares how fast an SSD is if it can only be relied upon as a write-only device ???
Score
1
April 7, 2012 6:41:16 PM

Let me ask something really quick. I am planning on getting another Vertex III max iops 120gb edition. When do you think the max iops editions for these drives will release?
Score
0
April 8, 2012 4:58:24 PM

burnley14It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.


Whats a BSOD once a week between friends? They really should just do stone solid no hassle drive AND atleast get the firmware updating crazy easy and reliable. Intel and m4's for me.. OK I admit the 256gb version is a bit burning idea :) 
Score
0
April 8, 2012 5:40:33 PM

burnley14It's interesting because so many people have talked about how unreliable they are, but in my personal experience (a small sample size, granted) I've been very pleased with both the Vertex 2's performance and reliability and the Agility 3's. Maybe I'm just lucky.


Most people that bash products order one, it fails for whatever reason, they send it back and get another, it works - and they think "My failure rate is 50%!"

Often, no consideration is given to any other possible source of problem, either.

From reading reviews over the last couple of years and seeing how often the controllers on SSDs are buggy when first released, regardless of whose name is on the outside of the package, I'm really glad to see companies put effort into developing controllers themselves (Samsung and OCZ). Hopefully, this will put pressure on the entire industry to not only vie for the fastest, but also the best in terms of reliability from the start.

;) 
Score
2
April 10, 2012 12:47:18 AM

Based partly on this review, along with the Anandtech review, I decided to get a 120GB version. While the writes are quite a bit slower, the reads are still close to these. It's great. I love it. Money well spent.
Score
2
April 10, 2012 7:11:23 AM

It's a rare case when a new SSD comes out and apparently is cheaper than the previous gen.
Score
2
Anonymous
April 10, 2012 10:02:07 AM

Quote:
With SSDs I want to know two things first:
1. If I store data on it, will I get the data back consistently for at least 5 years?
2. If there is a powerfluctuation during a write-cycle, will it consistently store the data?

That means in any review of SSDs, the first thing I am going to look for is how it handles voltage fluctuations.

I don't see that here.

Who cares how fast an SSD is if it can only be relied upon as a write-only device ???


I'm not sure, what you're on about. I've experienced the same thing with HDDs. It is PSU at fault. Needless to say, if your PSU is messing with storage, get a new one immediately.
Score
0
April 16, 2012 9:28:15 AM

AnonymousI'm not sure, what you're on about. I've experienced the same thing with HDDs. It is PSU at fault. Needless to say, if your PSU is messing with storage, get a new one immediately.


What part of the computer is at fault for a failure is irrelevant. If the PSU fails and causes a surge, will the SSD suffer a failure to write the data it needs to write, or will it finish writing successfully?
Score
0
Anonymous
April 28, 2012 1:16:49 AM

I'm thinking the switch might have something to do with trying to get away from the sandforce name. OCZ got a lot of bad press over the issues with the sandforce controllers, and changing to a different type might just be a good marketing decision with some added benefits.
Score
1
April 29, 2012 8:44:31 PM

Way to go OCZ, way to go indeed
Score
0
May 1, 2012 12:46:30 AM

Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.

http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zo

I'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.
Score
1
May 9, 2012 1:24:13 AM

Winning29Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zoI'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.


Please, load up the new firmware and do another test.
Score
0
!