With the Vertex 450 OCZ officially launches their second product that features 20 nanometer NAND from the Intel/Micron joint venture. With the Vertex 3.20 they introduced these 20nm chips to the market and now their equipping their faster Vertex 4 with the same NAND flash chips. We're really curious to see what they've come up with. The Vertex 450 with 256 Gigabyte could be a really interesting drive and when the price hits a sweet spot, then it will definitely sell well.


Article in English

Artikel in Deutsch

Article en français

Articolo in Italiano

Specifications / Delivery

Model	OCZ Vertex 460 120 Gigabyte	OCZ Vertex 460 240 Gigabyte	OCZ Vertex 460 480 Gigabyte
Capacity	120 Gigabyte	240 Gigabyte	480 Gigabyte
Form Factor	2.5'', 7mm	2.5'', 7mm	2.5'', 7mm
Memory	19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles	19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles	19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles
Technology
Throughput	530 MB/s sequential read 420 MB/s sequential write 80'000 IOPS 4K random read 90'000 IOPS 4K random write	540 MB/s sequential read 525 MB/s sequential write 85'000 IOPS 4K random read 90'000 IOPS 4K random write	545 MB/s sequential read 525 MB/s sequential write 95'000 IOPS 4K random read 90'000 IOPS 4K random write
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms
MTBF	2'000'000 hours	2'000'000 hours	2'000'000 hours
Acoustics	no noise	no noise	no noise
Warranty	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years

With the entire supply chain in their back OCZ it can now be expected from the company that the Vertex 460 is not only a very quick drive but also features an aggressive price tag. A closer look at the controller reveals, that there is the same Barefoot 3 M10 logic, that could be found with the Vertex 450 already. Apparently, since OCZ is now using latest Toshiba NAND there were some changes to the firmware necessary, in order to keep performance and endurance up as high as possible.

With the Vertex 460 you get OCZ's Barefoot 3 M10 controller which the company develops inhouse. According to the block diagram we can see that the controller is based on an ARM architecture. Additionally OCZ optimized the clock generator towards lower power consumption, which they already did when they released the Vertex 450. In other words this means, they've lowered the internal clock speeds in order to make the drive more energy efficient. Furthermore this drive ships with AES 256 Bit encryption as well as an ECC engine which is taking care of error corrections. On the right hand side of the diagram you can see that OCZ equips the Vertex 460 with an additional DRAM cache, which in the end helps improving performance. When it comes to the NAND interface, OCZ uses and eight channel ONFI/Toggle interface.

The Vertex 460 drives features NAND flash, that has been manufactured using 19 nanometer structures. When it comes to the manufacturing process of NAND flash, then a customer gets an upside as well as a downside at the same time. Let's talk about the upside first: a shrink enables the manufacturer to put more memory chips on one 300 millimeter wafer. In other words the manufacturing process becomes more cost efficient. This cost efficiency is going to be carried to the end user who actually buys these products for a lower price. The downside however is, that making the structures smaller causes the P/E-cycles to drop. Most 25 nanometer MLC NAND flash chips featured a P/E-cycle count of either 5'000 or 3'000. Toshibas XYZ 19 nanometer chips - the ones you find on the Vertex 460 - are validated at 3'000 P/E-cycles.

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

Discuss this article in the forum