OCZ Vertex 4 SSD review - Introduction

Introduction

It's the 4th of the month... of the 4th month... time for Vertex 4!

Early December last year OCZ introduced the Octane series SSDs. Armed with their own proprietary technology -- and that makes a difference. See, ever since a year or two their most popular SSDs all have been SandForce controller based. That by itself is a little risky because, as a company, you do not want to be too reliant on one 3rd party IC.

Two things happened in the past year though -- SandForce series 2200 has had firmware issues (which are 100% resolved), but then something else happened, a month or 5 ago LSI had purchased SandForce. And though LSI is a colleague and sales partner, they now also are competition.

OCZ knew SandForce was for sale a long time ago, however might have thought the price tag was just too expensive. Not at all by accident OCZ made a surprising move, Indilinx was for sale as well. They purchased the intellectual property of that company which in their basis has a massively potential controller, though combined with cache chips.

Once Indilinx was purchased and restructured into the OCZ family, they started designing something hot and new, and the first Indilinx based SATA3 (6G) product arrived on the market, is was the... Octane.

Though not the fastest kid on the block in terms of write performance, the Indilinx controller did show massive potential. And it was released at exactly the right time, as the end-users became weary of SandForce products after all the Firmware issues they had heard and read about.

Today we test the second series SSDs based on the OCZ Indilinx 2 controller. It is the Vertex 4 SSDs, delivered with the speed of light here in our binary test facility located in a secret underground place in Groningen to be able to make the NDA date.

So yeah, have a peek of what the Vertex 4 SSD is, with a Vertex 4 512GB sample, a Vertex 4 256GB sample and we'll add a Vertex 3 480GB in these tests as well.