OCZ Vertex 4 SSD revisited with FW 1.4RC review - Introduction

Introduction - OCZ Vertex 4 --  revisited with Firmware 1.4

The Vertex 4 revisited with Firmware 1.4 (Release Candidate) -- Last Friday we received news from OCZ that they will be releasing a significant Firmware update soon for the Vertex 4 series. We already stated it in the review -- Vertex 4 was rushed to the market to quick and as such we expected that Firmware updates would make the product faster as the potential was there, but not quite showing.

Exactly a month after OCZ released the Vertex 4 we had the opportunity to test the new V1.4RC firmware which whows the Vertex 4 SSD potential very much, as the overall performance is much faster. This is exciting news and the actual perf differences are so big that we decided to update the original review with results from the upcoming firmware. So this article in its basis is the reference review, yet with updated performance results and a slightly changed introduction an conclusion (based on the new findings).

Have a peek as the new  V1.4 firmware is going to change the product segmentation for OCZ aright.

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.