OCZ Vertex 120 GB SSD review - Introduction

Week after week after week manufacturers of SSD drives are improving their products. The technology is hot, and thanks to all the competition we see improved products being developed at a very fast rate. Some manufacturers, in less then a year, released three different revisions of their SSD lineup.

Along these lines, in our last article we already discussed some of the concerns with early model SSD drives, all related to SSD drives with a JMicron controller. But make no mistake, I feel there's very little wrong really with JMicron SSD drives, if you can live with a small stutter every now and then and take some precautions.

The addressed issues are not optimal, and in this business we seek the best, well not only seek the best... we demand the best. Some companies have been opting for some more creative solutions to get some of these standard SSD issues tackled (small file write performance).

OCZ decided to address that issue and solves it creatively. With the Vertex series SSD controllers OCZ offers an extremely high performing SSD with a new controller and... in addition to that a nice phat 64MB cache to tackle the slow small files write issue. Now taking this course of action makes SSDs even more expensive than they already are, but hear me out on this one. Technology as shown today at one stage will also reach high volume and yes... then the price will go down as well, much like we have seen with the early generation SSD drives from last year.

The result? Well, the Vertex is in many ways a stunning SSD drive that wipes the floor clean with JMicron controller based SSD drives. Of course it's definitely more expensive as well, and thus exactly why I say... don't write off JMicron drives just yet.

So head on over to the next page. In this review we'll cover our standard snippet on SSD drives, then dig a little deeper into the OCZ Vertex, throw some benchmarks at it... and allow this OC Vertex SSD to roar like a lion in heat. Next page please.