OCZ Vector 180 - 480 and 960GB SSD review - Product Showcase

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos. Right then, here comes the packaging. The samples come as a 480 and a 960 GB package. Performance is listed at a maximum of 550 MB/s read and 530 MB/s writes with 95,000 IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access with our tested model.
 

This is the 2.5" SATA III 480 GB version all packaged up in the bundle. You should easily be able to place it somewhere in your chassis. Small and light-weight. The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will regain its speed once in idle. Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 6 and 7, 8 and 9 chipset based products. We also find the latest AMD FM2 based chipsets to perform well. Included in the bundle is a manual, some screws and one shiny SSD. OCZ includes a 3.5" mounting bracket and the Acronis backup disk clone software compatible with Windows 8.1, which brings in very good value.

Acronis is limited though, you can manually make a backup, but stuff like scheduled backups etc. are disabled.

The SSD actually feels a little heavy due to the housing. When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. This drive is SATA 3 (6G). Obviously the drives are backwards compatible with SATA 2 as well, but the bandwidth limitation there would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which still is silly fast compared to HDDs).

A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We however never ever had issues with a standard older SATA 2 cable either. It seems that SATA 3 cables are a little thicker, that's all. The casing of the SSD is made out of metal, great for shielding. It does make the SSD a hint heavier though. But let's rip her open and peek inside shall we?