Conclusion

Opening this conclusion: the OCZ Vertex 3 definitely is a very good product. In fact it's by far the fastest "non-raided" SSD we've ever tested here. The new SandForce SF-2218 shows astonishing performance figures in the Vertex 3. Furthermore it absolutely doesn't matter what you test on this drive. Sequential throughput is just massive and the random IOPS are too. With 535 MByte/s read and 532 MByte/s write peak this drive almost hits the throughput limit of SATA-III which means that SSD manufacturers are already screaming for a SATA-IV standard.

If we take a closer look at the IOPS numbers and figures we see that the drive hits an absolutely massiv 70'000 IOPS when writing small 4 KByte blocks. With this level of performance the Vertex 3 outperforms even an IBIS drive which features and internal raid 0 architecture. A glance a the random read performance reveals an also very good 42'000 IOPS value. These very high numbers quantify what you experience when you put a Vertex 3 into a PC and use it actually for working. The drive is ultra responsive and for example the extraction of 1 GByte zip archives only takes a few seconds. If you one had to compare the user experience of the Vertex 3 with a still quick Intel x-25m the second feels almost slow. If you'd downgrade from a Vertex 3 to an Intel x-25m you'd be under the impression that your always waiting when you load a program or something else. This should give you a bit of a feeling how fast this drive really is.

When this review was published the Vertex 3 could've been bought for the following prices:

• OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB: CHF 299.- (ca. EUR 230.-)
• OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB: CHF 579.- (ca. EUR 445.-)
• OCZ Vertex 3 480 GB: CHF 1'703.- (ca. EUR 1'310.-)