The Vertex 460 marks a new chapter in the history of OCZ. Meanwhile Toshiba has bought OCZ and the company now operates under the name OCZ Storage Solutions as a subsidiary of Toshiba. When it comes to the Vertex 460, we have basically a Vertex 450 lying in front of us with the latest NAND flash memory from Toshiba. Other than that the firmware needed to be upgraded an optimized in order to sequeeze maximum performance out of the drive.


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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
Software	Acronis True Image	Acronis True Image	Acronis True Image
MSRP	89.99 Euro	169.99 Euro	329.99 Euro

With the entire supply chain backing them up, it can now be expected from OCZ 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, which could be found with the Vertex 450 as well. Apparently, OCZ is now using the latest Toshiba NAND and there were some changes to the firmware necessary in order to keep performance and endurance as high as possible.

With the Vertex 460 you get OCZ's latest Barefoot 3 M10 controller which the company developed in-house. 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 to improve performance. When it comes to the NAND interface, OCZ uses an eight channel ONFI/Toggle interface.

The Vertex 460 SSD features NAND flash, which has been manufactured using 19 nanometer manufacturin process. 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 manufacturing process 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	Page 6 - Random write KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 10 - Conclusion