OCZ Vertex TURBO SSD review test - OCZ Vertex TURBO 120GB

OCZ Vertex TURBO Series SATA II 2.5" SSD - 120GB

A very short while ago OCZ added a new product in its high-performance Series SSD family: the Vertex Turbo solid-state drives. With the massive amount of SSD disks in OCZ's line-up, let's try and make things clear a little.

The OCZ SSD family has three product segments:

• Mainstream: Core, Solid, Agility and Apex (MLC based)
• Performance: Vertex (Turbo) and Summit (MLC based)
• Enterprise: Vertex EX (SLC based)

Once we dissect the drives and look at specifications, things will look like this:

But let's startup some of the more important aspects and features of the drive. As there definitely are some things you guys needs to be aware of. First off, there are four models within the new Vertex TURBO series related to volume-size:

• 30GB OCZ Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTXT30G) € 120 (€4 per GB)
• 60GB OCZ Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTXT60G) € 210 (€3,50 per GB)
• 120GB OCZ Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTXT120G) € 350 (€2,92 per GB)
• 250GB OCZ Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTXT250G) € 650 (€2,60 per GB)

Four products within the Turbo series. Average costs per gigabyte of storage here is roughly hovering at the €3 per GB depending on the volume size.

The Vertex Turbo SSD series offers the same Indilinx 'Barefoot' controller and 64MB of DRAM buffer that the regular edition has, but now boasts ultra-fast 270/200 MBps read and write speed. An overclocked cache, now that is just sexy.

Why is that so important you ask ? The 'cache memory'. Well,  we have seen that most budget MLC based SSDs have a JMicron controller with very little cache (8KB / 16KB), and the issue there is that if they need to write a lot of really small files simultaneously these drives started to choke up every now and then, your a-typical data bottleneck. That issue was solved with big file-caches. And they surely work out really well.

SSDs need to fight off a bad habit, slow write times for a lot of small and petit files, that is where the sore bottleneck of SSD drives is to be found, and large data-caches can solve that issue very well. Some more features and specification of the Agile series SSD.

So the big trick is that the Vertex series SSD has a nice SDRAM buffer, 64MB to be precise, and that my friends helps big-time in tackling the small write access issues I just mentioned. First have a look at the regular Vertex and then have a look at the innards the Vertex Turbo 120GB model SSD:

OCZ Vertex (regular edition)

OCZ Vertex (TURBO edition)

To the right the Samsung flash memory chips, to the upper left the Indilinx Barefoot controller chip and just below it 64MB cache memory from Elpida. All combined they form the heart and soul of the Vertex Turbo series SSD. BTW we can see that OCZ changed their choice in NAND flash memory, likely faster to cope with the 180 MHz clock frequency.

I just checked a couple of prices and here in the Netherlands this is what pricing looks like:

• OCZ Agility Series 120GB € 287
• OCZ Vertex Series 120B € 310
• OCZ Vertex Turbo Series 120GB € 350

So then, 270MB/sec read performance and a write performance of nearly 200 MB/sec, that speed will certainly increase your overall PC experience, as the vertebrae of overall system speed and performance is your boot drive, the traditional HDD is a limiting factor on the overall PC experience you guys. Also, storage performance like this would, for example, greatly enhance load times of games. Not bad for a product weighing 77 grams.

OCZ labels the product a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure). I mentioned this a couple of times already but that really is a highly statistical figure and I just wish SSD manufacturers would just drop this value. Fact is, nobody really knows.

It would be more interesting to see a value in terms of lifespan based on operation. E.g. if you write 10GB of data per day, how long would it take before a drive would wear out completely. Some numbers say with average daily usage, the MLC drives will last ten years. But only the future will tell really. Also the reality is that a traditional HDD can die within 2 years just as well.

Warranty then, OCZ will give you a shy three years warranty on this product. And for a SSD of this caliber we feel that is okay, yet a little on the shy side. Patriot trumps everybody with a 10-year warranty on their Torqx series SSD drives. Brilliant really. We do hope to see that changed by other manufacturers as well.

But we mentioned MLC/SLC etc, lets walk through some of that technology.