OCZ Vector SSD review - Article

Breaking new ground with the OCZ Barefoot 3 Based Vector series

OCZ has been going strong in the SSD market ever since .. well ever since SSDs got mainstream in 2008. In this fierce and competitive market however you need to stand ground with the latest technology in order to lead. As such a back in March 2011 OCZ acquired Indilinx. With ongoing proprietary technology they have evolved the their Indilinx Barefoot series of controllers. The product tested today is already the 3rd iteration of this technology, called the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller -- developed in-house.

We've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning. And it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though and one brand quite popular in Europe now also has introduced a line of SSDs. 

While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing in a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD.  Next to that the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today ... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance.

Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir .. I am a fan.

So OCZ Today releases their all new Vector series of SSDs based upon that new Barefoot 3 controller tied to high performance 25nm IMFT Nand flash memory.

OCZ submitted the Vector 256GB model with impressive specs. The 256GB models have sustained read/write levels of 550 MB/sec and 530 MB/sec respectively. And with 4K random write performance estimated at 90~100 IOPS (input/output operations per second) it's launching with the intent to impress alright. Have a peek first, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.
 

OCZ Vector SSD with 25nm IMFT NAND and the Barefoot 3 controller