Conclusion

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After having a closer look at the performance of the Vertex 4 with 256 Gigabyte and the Vertex 4 with 512 Gigabyte and OCZ's latest firmware version 1.4 we see basically see two things. The average sequential read performance of the Vertex 4 256 Gigabyte increases by a whopping 36 percent and the average sequential write performance goes up by 16 percent. For the Vertex 4 with 512 Gigabyte we see performance increase by 36 percent for sequential read operations and a 3.5 percent increase on average for sequential write. Concerning random IOPS the drive was very fast right from the beginning and therefore there are only little differences. Another thing we saw is that there are no more performance drops when testing block sizes between 16 KB and 256 KB. The values are much more consistent now then they were before the firmware update.

Users who bought a Vertex 4 should really consider updating the firmware of the drive to the latest version. The performance increase is really worth it but unfortunately almost everything has a downside and in this case there is no difference. Updating the firmware will also erase all the files on your drive.