OCZ Technology 256GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry’s Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty – VTX4-25SAT3-256G
- Up to 535 MB/s Sequential Reads
- Up to 95,000 Random Write IOPS
- Up to 120,000 Maximum IOPS
- Access Latency as Low as 0.02ms
- 3.5″ SSD adapter for desktop
- Maximum IOPS 120K IOPS
- Random 4k Read IOPS 90K IOPS
- Random 4k Write IOPS 85K IOPS
- Sequential Reads Up to 550 MB/s
- Sequential Writes Up to 465 MB/s
OCZ Technology 256GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry’s Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty – VTX4-25SAT3-256G As the fourth generation of the legendary Vertex SSD family, the Vertex 4 Series pushes storage performance to the max and redefines the modern day computing experience. Vertex 4 SSDs are innovatively engineered to deliver industry-leading file transfer rates and superior system responsiveness, all while providing a more durable, reliable, a
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THE HACKER'S MANUAL 2012 Linux Format Special Edition NEW Published OCTOBER 2012
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Good job OCZ,
OCZ’s new Vertex 4 drive is probably the fastest current SSD under most common consumer usage purposes. It is blazing fast and has none of the blue screen of death (BSOD) issues of previous drives using Sandforce controllers. OCZ is now using a new Marvel/Indilinx controller with 25nm MLC NAND flash memory. Therefore, OCZ is confident enough to give this drive a 5 year warranty. This is my second SSD and it blows the previous one out of the water. Be aware that almost all of the negative reviews on this drive are from before the 1.5 firmware update (which is now preinstalled).
Right now, the top three SSDs (best selling and best reviews) on Amazon are the OCZ Vertex 4, Samsung 830, and the Crucial M4. The Passmark benchmark scores are as follows: 3589 for the Vertex 4, 3230 for the Samsung 830, and 2409 for the best Crucial M4. Passmark averages all submitted test samples so it is not very sensitive to outliers.
The Vertex 4 has an amazing 120k input/output operations per second which is 30-40% higher than almost all other drives and it has great access times. The sequential write which was a weakness is no longer so due to the firmware updates (it is actually now a strength). But keep in mind that 95+% (perhaps 99+%) of the time you will be reading from the drive and the read speed, in particular random read, is where you’ll see almost all of the speedup. Even if you write on the drive often, there are almost no sources you can draw from that will use up all of the write speed of any newer generation drive. If you are downloading from the internet (even if you are on a 100Mpbs T3 line) you won’t come close to the write speed of a standard hard drive. Alternatively, if you are writing to the SSD from a big data hard drive, the SSD write speed will definitely not be the bottleneck. The only time you will see speedups is with SSD to SSD writes (but how often do you do that?) or more specialized operations such as data generation.
The thing that the OCZ Vertex 4 excels at above and beyond all other drives is its performance on incompressible data (think videos and pictures). Sandforce based drives attain most of their speed with clever compression algorithms but tend to do poorly on incompressible data.
OCZ always had the lowest prices and fastest drives before but reliability was a significant issue. I’m glad they finally figured it out. You can now buy one of the cheapest drives out there (prices are comparable to Vertex 3) with speed and reliability. SSD’s sure have come a long way.
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Update 5/7/12
My drive still works perfectly and I just installed the new firmware so that the write speed more than doubled! The read speed also received a significant boost. This is the first time that I have become even happier with a purchase a few weeks in.
The new specs are:
550 MB/s read, 420 MB/s write for the 128 GB model
550 MB/s read, 465 MB/s write for the 256 GB model
550 MB/s read, 475 MB/s write for the 512 GB model
It seems like the SATA 3 interface is the limiting factor on the read speeds now. Because the firmware is so aggressive, it is destructive so that you must install it before you install your operating system or install it when the SSD is the slave drive.
The drive still blows away the competition on the IOPS and the random reads and writes on incompressible data which is almost an order of magnitude faster.
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Update 9/8/12
My drive still works perfectly and the new firmware increased the speed even a bit more (see product info). With the myriad models of the newest generation of drives, it is hard for the average consumer to choose. All the drives now have outstanding read and write speeds (in excess of 400 MB/s) so the real world speed differences come from access time and IOPS (both of which the Vertex 4 excels at). It scores over 50% higher than the Crucial M4 on the PassMark hard drive benchmark.
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|Solid improvement in my system,
UPDATE 9/5/12
A month since the last update and still going strong! Zero problems so far, still have 100% drive life remaining (according to S.M.A.R.T.), and I’ve stopped even considering the possibility that anything bad is going to happen to this drive. My notebook may be heavy and chunky compared to today’s ultrabooks, but with my Vertex 4 in it it’s a true road warrior and I’ve been commuting with it to campus now that school has started up again.
I’ll see you again at the six month mark if all goes well!
UPDATE 8/6/12
It’s been over a week since installation and I haven’t had a single problem. Any issues I mentioned in my review seem to have been one-offs and have not repeated themselves. As a result, and as promised, I’m bumping my rating up to 5 stars. I’ve also changed the title from “Solid but not overwhelming improvement in my system” to “Solid improvement in my system”, along with a few references to the title in the review itself.
I notice the price of this drive decreased by about 13% (my inventive way of indicating a price shift without getting filtered by Amazon) since I bought it about ten days or so ago. I’m not surprised since Samsung’s 840 Series drive at this same capacity recently dropped in price to where this Vertex 4 is now. The SSD market is highly competitive, and as drives get ever cheaper there’s less and less of an excuse not to pick one up.
In the past week I got around my instrument loading problem by switching to a mode that allows me to only load the attack portion of each sample to RAM and stream the remainder from the drive. Since SSDs excel at rapid access times (around 0.2 ms read access for the Vertex 4, versus around 9 ms for a standard desktop HDD) and random reads, this works far better than it did with any HDD I tried it on and gives me performance parity with simply loading the entire huge file into memory. Since I couldn’t have reasonably done this before I got my Vertex 4 I can’t in honesty say I have any complaints about my new drive.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
Note that I just received and installed this drive several days ago, and that this review is based on that experience. I plan on updating this space as time goes on.
EXPECTATIONS & GOALS
I bought this drive, after over a week of intensive research, so that I could hopefully load virtual instruments (VSTs) in my DAW faster. On a standard notebook HDD this can take over a minute depending on the instrument. Apart from that, I was interested in the usual benefits commonly associated with SSDs:
-Faster bootup
-Faster program launches
-Snappier performance (e.g. smoother multitasking, better UI responsiveness, etc)
-Faster Internet page loads
-Faster program installation
-An overall feeling of improved feedback and responsiveness (kind of everything listed above rolled together)
We’ll explore how well the Vertex 4 accomplishes all these points.
MY SYSTEM
I’m using this drive in a 2009-era HP dv6-1355dx, which came with the following:
-4 GB of DDR3 RAM (updated concurrently with the drive to 8 GB)
-2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor
-500 GB Fujitsu 5400 RPM 2.5″ HDD
-Intel 4 Series Express chipset
-Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
This system is definitely a bit long in the tooth, but it’s probably typical of what a lot of folks might have, and it should give a good indication what kind of improvement can be expected from a SSD.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
The Vertex 4 comes nicely packaged, with the drive seated in a protective layer of thick foam. In the box you’ll find a 2.5″-to-3.5″ adapter plate, four mounting screws, a quickstart guide, a fun “My SSD is faster than your HDD” sticker, and of course the drive itself, sealed in a stiff translucent plastic wrapper. If your box didn’t come with all this, assuming OCZ hasn’t changed its packaging for this drive, you might want to check with OCZ or the seller to make sure everything is okay.
Installation was simple. I had no trouble swapping the Vertex 4 for the HDD, and I was done in a little over a minute. The system POSTed with the drive installed, so all was well.
SETUP
Here’s where I met my first wrinkle. OCZ provides two separate utilities for updating the firmware on their drives: The OCZ Toolbox, which runs from within Windows, and OCZ Tools, which is a bootable Linux-based tool. Since I planned to do a clean install of Windows 7, I had already burned the OCZ Tools utility to a disc before I began. Loading this utility worked fine, but for some reason it couldn’t connect to OCZ’s server to download the latest firmware. Confusingly, it stated that there was no newer version available, when I knew very well that this was not true. The drive shipped with firmware 1.4.3, and the latest version (as of…
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|Great for macbook pro w/Lion and ML!,
I bought this for my early 2011 macbook pro and mid 2009 mbp and it works great but there are some steps to getting the drive up to date and working.
**UPDATE** works great with Mountain Lion 10.8
Here are some instructions on what to do for people who want to know about making this drive work with the mbp.
0. Backup all data you want from your old drive because you wont have it anymore after you remove it
1. take out old drive and replace with your new SSD (look for youtube videos on how to do this)
2. power on the laptop while holding the “option” key
3. connect the the internet and choose internet recovery
4. when you get into the install screen open disk utilities and select the drive
5. create a new (1 partition) and format your new drive as Mac OS Journaled
6. close disk utility and install Lion onto the drive
ok great now your drive is working and the OS is installed, but the drive is NOT updated to the latest firmware (helps to drive work at its best)
(just a warning this is more advanced)
7. goto OCZ’s website for the latest vertex 4 firmware (please read all their instructions on how to update, below is my self-experienced abridged version)
8. download their OCZ Tools utility and burn it to a disk (dvd or CD, i used toast to do this but you can use disk utility also-> for help google “burn iso image osx”)
9. restart computer holding option key again and choose to boot from the disk
10. wait for computer to reboot, your touchpad and Wifi wont work… so you need to plug in a USB mouse and connect via ethernet (MUST have net for this to work)
11. click the mac update tool on the bottom bar
12. make sure it is asking to update the vertex 4 (will say y/n)
13. say yes to setting to AHCI and do a normal update
14. after it is done it will ask you to press “S” and repeat the process 1 time as of 6/26/12 (start back @ step 9)
15. if everything is updated and everything is clear on being completed, shutdown the tool and restart the computer normally
16. YOU DID IT!!! easy right? enjoy instant loads and a now much cooler (temp.) and nearly silent laptop
The product itself is a 5 star product, just the installing and updating is not easy for a casual user hence the -1 star
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