Introduction

OCZ Vertex 2 - put that SSD in 6th gear

OCZ is back to attack with a new SSD in that slowly saturating SSD storage market. Yes, the Vertex 2 is finally here. OCZ has been on a winning streak with their SSD drives ever since that started selling Indilinx controller based products. Armed with that controller and a nice phat cache these SSDs show brilliant performance.

Recently however a new name in the controller market popped up, SandForce. Decent drives that promise high peak performance, very good random IO read performance, and very importantly, extremely kick-ass random IO write performance.

The SandForce controllers will bring extensive performance equal and even higher to the Indilinx products yet without the need for additional cache memory. And that sounds weird really ... not using additional cache memory to solve the random IO perf of small files. The random IO on read/write rates spotted on this Vertex 2 takes productivity to the next level as we'll show you later on.

Our preview based on the Vertex 2 Pro had the SF1500 controller that certainly had some issues. With the final release of the Vertex 2 we spot an SF1200 controller IC on the SSD PCB, and that certainly makes a whole difference. This drive is rated at a Max Read speed of  285 MB/s and for writes that is 275 MB/s. The downside, they stripped off 20GB and as it seems 100 GB sells at an MSRP of $399.99.

You guys ready to meet SandForce? Let's go peek at that all new Vertex 2 SSD.