Since OCZ has bought Indilinx we the manufacturer presented - with the Octane - an entry level SSD which offers an attractive price point. With the Vertex 4 OCZ releases their new performance SSD, which is based on the latest Indilinx IDX400M00-BC Controller. This is reason enough for us to be curious about how this thing is going to perform in our benchmark parcours. In this review we're going to take a closer look at the 512 Gigabyte model which should offer maximum performance.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	OCZ Vertex 4 512 Gigabyte
Capacity	512 Gigabyte
Memory	Synchronous NAND Flash
Technology	Intel 29 F32B08JCME3
Throughput	up to 535 MB/s reading, up to 475 MB/s writing up to 95'000 IOPS write up to 85'000 IOPS read
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise
Warranty	5 Years

Behind the scenes

Basically the Vertex 4 from OCZ is a 512 Gigabyte SSD, which uses an Indilinx IDX400M00-BC controller and synchronous NAND Flash memory from Intel. These have been manufactured using a 25 nanometer process and the individual chips have 29 F32B08JCME3 written on them. This indicates that the memory cells are specified for 5'000 P/E cycles and the memory itself is connected to the controller via ONFi 2.x standard.

Some readers might have noticed, that OCZ now provides a five year warranty plan with the Vertex 4. For the Vertex 3 and almost all other drives that are available at this time warranty is limited to three years. The reason for this can be found in the so called Ndurance 2.0 Technology, which is an umbrella term of which for example reduced write amplification is part of. At this point OCZ emphasizes that they achieved this without the use of any compression algorithms and therefore there will be no performance drops. Furhtermore there is also support for Advanced Multi-Level ECC, Adaptive NAND Flash Management, Redundant NAND Array Technology and 256 bit AES encryption.

Delivery

Included in delivery you find the SSD itself, a cover, a small manual, an adapter to put the SSD into a 3.5 inch slot, screws and a sticker. For the Vertex 4 OCZ make use of their standard box which we know from several other SSDs.

Page 1 - Introduction / Specs / Delivery	Page 8 - Sequential write ops
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 9 - Sequential read ops
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 10 - Random write ops
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 11 - Random read ops
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 12 - Atto
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s	Page 13 - Conclusion
Page 7 - Random read KByte/s

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