OCZ Vertex 3.20 SSD review - Article

The OCZ Vertex 3.20 going 20nm

OCZ Technology has quite a number of SSDs in their lineup from Octane, the Vertex 3, Vertex 4 and more recently the Vector series. The competition is steep though, the market is saturating and we have seen a steady decline in the sales prices of SSDs, I mean what Samsung and Micron are doing these days is pretty impressive. 

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, in the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle at just under 1 USD per GB. 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. So OCZ figured, let's take the Sandforce 2281 based unit from the shelves, pop some 20nm NAND flash memory on there and release a fast and reliable SSD at a sweet-spot price. That my friends is the essence of the Vertex 3.20, a Vertex 3 equipped with new 20nm NAND flash memory. The Vertex 3.20 is a SATA III (also known as SATA 6G and SATA 600) SSD that has been beefed up to shock, awe and conquer. The device can top 500 MB/s in both read and writes, pure unadulterated performance from a single SSD.

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. Today's product reached read speeds of 550 MB/sec with write speeds of 520 MB/sec. When you think about that performance and place it in relation to real-world performance (if the source is equally fast), that means you could copy the entire contents of a CDROM in just over a second to the SSD and a DVD in less than 10 seconds.

So without further ado, have a peek at the latest product that is the OCZ Technology SATA3 based Vertex 3.20.

OCZ Vertex 3.20 SSD with 20nm NAND and SandForce 2281 controller