OCZ Vertex 3 PRO review - Specifications and architecture

We've been claiming it for years, the SATA II controller is a bottleneck for future generation SSDs as literally they where hitting the upper plafond in terms of performance. We've now reached that threshold. With the slow move towards SATA III, effectively the bandwidth your storage device can work in has doubled up, and believe it or not ... that's great but still not enough for the years to come as SSD performance over the coming year or two will take an even larger leap in peak performance.

We have stated it many times and explained this quite a bit, but the seek time on SSD drives are insane; nothing short of amazing, at less than 1ms -- 0.1ms as we actually can measure. The average seek time for a traditional HDD is roughly 9ms. Do the math, hey, no more moving and spinning mechanical components is the key here.

The traditional HDD is a limiting factor on the overall PC experience. Also, storage performance like this will, for example, greatly enhance load times of Photoshop, Generic applications, Office, games load times and even simple stuff like browsing the web will become a much faster experience.

But let's move onwards to the SSD itself.

Specifications and architecture

Here's where we'll look a little deeper inside the actual product. The OCZ Vertex 3 PRO is, as stated, an SSD based on MLC NAND flash memory.

The difference though is that it uses that new SATA III interface. The end result here is that you'll get a storage unit with a massive IO performance, peaking up-to 550 MB/sec in read performance and a scorching 500 MB/sec write performance.

Now, always bare in mind that a manufacturer loves to show you the burst / maximum peak performance, not average. Regardless of that fact, which we'll show you in the benchmark sessions, this storage unit is just extremely fast.

The SSD is available in several volume sizes: 100, 200 and 400 GB are available. The products range from roughly 525 USD towards, 750 USD for this 200GB version and a nauseating 1350 USD for the 400 GB version, OCZ covers the unit with a 3 year warranty. Some key features:

• SATA III / 6Gbps
• Implements SandForce 2582 Controller with power loss data protection & data recovery protection
• Enhanced BCH ECC capability
• Supports SATA-7 Security Erase
• Efficient Write Amplification Factor of less than 1 (4K database transfer workload)
• Comprehensive SSD specific S.M.A.R.T. attributes
• 28% over-provisioning for optimal drive endurance and data protection & management
• Significantly improved performance over previous generation
  o Delivers 30% faster IOPS, and 40% faster sequential read/write throughputs
• Enterprise-Class solution that supports both MLC NAND Flash, Enterprise-grade eMLC technologies
• MTBF: 10 Million Hours

To understand the product we'll need to realize that there are primary technologies embedded into the storage unit. As such we'll continue the technology coverage in two stages:

1. The SSD partitions paired with controller
2. SATA III 6 Gbit interface

We'll explain each one in a simple manner.