Conclusion

With the Vertex 120GB MLC OCZ shows a solid product which definitely is an upgrade to a conventional hard drive. The Indilinx Barefoot controller with 64 MByte cache - in case of the 120 GByte version - combined with the most recent firmware, does a good job. The only pity is, that OCZ, since publishing the latest firmware, went up with the price so that the price per gigabyte is nearly as high as for an Intel X25-M drive.

The claimed throughput of 250 MByte/second reading and 180 MByte/second writing can't be reached in case of sequential reading only by a small margin but in case of sequential writing we saw with 216 MByte/second values far beyond what is claimed. The best thing about the OCZ Vertex 120 GByte SSD with 64 MByte cache is the fact that also the throughput with small block is increased. When it comes down to reading 4 KByte blocks randomly it is even faster than an Intel X25-M drive. In case of writing is way faster than conventional hard drive and all the JMicron SSD but still not as quick as the Intel derivates. This definitely is a step into the right direction and we hope that OCZ together with Indilinx further upgrades their firmware so that in the future we can expect even more performance out of these drives.

Potential buyers of a Vertex SSD - no matter what capacity the have - we recommend flashing their freshly bought drive to the newest firmware. OCZ and Indilinx together work under high pressure to improve their firmware which results directly in more performance. We also recommend to check the OCZ website on a regular basis and look for new firmware upgrades. The only pity is that you need a persistent backup otherwise your data will be lost after flashing the drive.

The OCZ Vertex with 120 GByte capacitiy is a solid performer and as a system disk a good upgrade to recent hard drives.

The OCZ Vertex can be bought at Brack Electronics to a price of CHF 589.- (est. EUR 460.-).

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch and m.seiler@ocaholic.ch