Conclusion

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With the Vertex 4, OCZ has an SSD in its portfolio that comes with synchronous NAND Flash and a good price/performance ratio. Astonishingly high, that's what the 4k random IOPS are. At the end of the day you get 83'000 IOPS when doing 4k reads and 81'000 IOPS when performing 4k writes. Therefore the Vertex 4 is a really fast drive when it comes to every day usage, because the random writes do have a highly significant influence on how fast a drive feels.

A closer look at the sequential thoughput rates reveals that therer is robust performance level especially at higher block sizes. Regarding sequential reads we see Atto values which top out at 482 Megabyte per second for read performance. Concerning sequential writes the manages to reach 375 Megabyte per seconds. If you keep in mind, that the new Indilinx controller doens't care about compression it is also possible to move big files at very high transfer speeds.

If we furthermore look at the throughput rates at 16k, 32k, 64k and 128k block size we see that the drive struggles a bit. Generally it looks like OCZ has optimized the new Indilinx controller as well as the firmware for high 4k IOPS and high sequentials with big bock sizes.

The recommended price for this 256 Gigabyte model is 349 US-Dollar. Therefore also the price point is on a competitive level. Last but not least there are five years warranty, which is two years more then almost any other manufacturer offers.

The OCZ Vertex 4 with 256 Gigabyte receives very good five out of five stars.