Toshiba OCZ VX500 SSD review - Introduction

Toshiba OCZ VX500 SATA3 SSD
Value for money at 30 cents per GB

Join as we review the latest storage spawn from Toshiba, the Toshiba OCZ VX500 series SSDs. This new model positions itself in the mainstream SSD segment fighting with the Samsung EVO series, Crucial MX300 and comparable SSDs in both price and performance. It is an SSD series that is 100% Toshiba proprietary, that includes the controller and 15nm MLC NAND flash memory.  Value for money wise you will receive a an SSD series that is fast enough, it won't break your wallet and comes with a great after-sales warranty program. You guys might have noticed a change in the OCZ series SSDs, they are now being branded as Toshiba with OCZ product series. Roughly a year or two ago Toshiba purchased OCZ. Up-to April this year OCZ functioned as a separate brand owned by Toshiba, the decision was made to house OCZ as a brand inside Toshiba

Yes, in a storage world dominated by the big guns like Micron and Samsung margins are getting smaller and smaller. Toshiba OCZ needed to address that to get the price per gigabyte down and offer a competitive solution that is fast, will be excellent in any PC and obviously a product that can compete with the Samsungs EVO series in both price and performance. To do so they are using an in-house Toshiba controller that steers all new 15nm MLC based Toshiba NAND flash memory. So the Toshiba OCZ VX500  series is obviously SATA 6Gb/s based and comes with read performance of up-to 550MB/s and a peak write performance of 515MB/s with IOPS 4K read/Write: 92k/65k. These SSDs are rated at 74~592 TB (depending on volume size) written during the 5-year warranty period.

The new Toshiba OCZ VX500 series also offer improved power efficiency, 3.4W under full load and 5 mW when it's sleeping, these are impressive values so you could consider using this puppy in a laptop as well. Toshiba will release four model, the 128, 256, 512 and 1024 GB versions. Endurance is another factor alongside reliability. In today's review for example we'll look at the product and see how fast it remains even after thrashing the SSD with over 3TB host writes written. The Toshiba OCZ VX500 isn't shy with writing either, this SSD series is rated at 296 TB written for five years for the 512GB model. The VX500 series is receiving an 'Advanced Warranty Program', previously known as ShieldPlus warranty (we'll explain what that entails in the conclusion). The end result is an SSD that is fast and competitive in terms of pricing. It was only two years ago that we wrote that SSD prices settled at just under 1 EURO per GB for the end-user, last year prices have been hovering at 70 cents per GB and currently you can already find SSDs priced as low as at ~28 Cents (EURO) per GB of storage volume.

The VX500 breaks down that price even more at just under 30 cents per GB for the 512GB model. 

VX500 128GB / VX500-25SAT3-128G	€65	550 MB/sec Read - 485 MB/sec Write
VX500 256GB / VX500-25SAT3-256B	€95	550 MB/sec Read - 510 MB/sec Write
VX500 512GB / VX500-25SAT3-512G	€145	550 MB/sec Read - 515 MB/sec Write
VX500 1024GB / VX500-25SAT3-1T	€355	550 MB/sec Read - 515 MB/sec Write

The specs are nice enough by any standard. The models have sustained read levels of close to 550 MB/sec and up-to 515 MB/sec respectively. Have a peek first, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.