About a year ago, OCZ announced its acquisition of Indilinx, the first competitor for Intel in making SSD controllers. Eight months later, OCZ released the first SSD based on the Indilinx acquisition, the OCZ Octane. Now, five months later, OCZ releases a new flagship SSD in its top line of Vertex SSDs, the first one based in the series based on Indilinx Everest 2 controllers and a huge move away from SandForce based controllers. OCZ will continue to move away from SandForce controllers, but the future for the company is clearly Indilinx. Below is the spec sheet of various OCZ SSDs, and a look of what’s to come.
To sum the AnandTech review up, we have a winner on our hands. OCZ Vertex 4 beats the latest SSDs from Intel and Samsung, and the advantage over SandForce based controllers is extremely clear, mainly because the Vertex 4 is able to deliver handsome results with all kinds of operations and data. The only place where the Vertex 4 lags is sequential read performance, however OCZ has said that an upcoming firmware update will improve the above. Another issue is the idle power consumption, the OCZ Vertex 4 consumes over 1W power on standby. It’s a small amount, but it can make a difference when the SSD is used in a notebook. Unfortunately, the only place where we cannot judge the Vertex 4 right now is reliability, which time will tell. So, if you are looking to buy a SSD right now, the best choice is still the Samsung 830 series, but if you absolutely require every last bit of performance, the OCZ Vertex 4 is the best you can get.
Head on to AnandTech for their extensive review.
