OCZ Vertex 2 3.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD3-2VTX120G

Pros: MBPS Reliability 3.5" size OCZ support and forum

Cons: None I can think of, other than it is not recommended to use over 60% of MB. But then that's not a con.. it's part of using an SSD. If you install over 60% of GB space they slow down. Had I thought it out I would have bought one 240GB or higher.

Overall Review: First I had one and was impressed. Then wanting to remove my HHD out of the equasion, I bought a second one to use in Raid0. I couldn't be happier. Bench32 has me hovering right under 500mbps. I had read that Raid0 is not recommended.. many months later I have had nothing but success. As an overclocker, these are so awesome that I am not OC'd much at all. The SSD's themselves feel like an OC. Not one problem and I'm running these with a 3 screen eyefinity setup. Browser on one, something on another and video/TV on the third. Gaming, incresed FPS. I don't think I'll ever use an HDD for more than a backup drive again. I recommend thinking out how much GB space you need. Devide by 60%, and buy one big enough to fit your needs and growth room. I ended out spending on 2, what I could have got one for anyhow. Get one for your OS only and quick booting.. remember a chain is only as good as it's weakest link. You will be glad you did.

Pros: Regular hard disks can come close to the sequential read/write speed, but where this drive destroys them is in access time and IOPS. A std hard disk is good for 100-500 I/O operations per second (IOPS); I measured 41,800 IOPS under a 50/50 mix of 4kQD32 random reads and writes and .01ms access time. Sequential reads and writes (of compressible data) are on par with what OCZ advertizes. Uncompressable data is going to be slower (about 40-60% slower for me).

Cons: gen. 3 SSD drives as well as sandforce-2000 controllers are coming out shortly. the price will drop on the old tech. i didnt want to wait that long and still dont regret buying this drive. OCZ Recomends.... "Do not use AS_SSD (writes between 3-5 GiB) on default settings. Do not use CDM (writes between 15-19 GiB) on default settings. Do not use AS_SSD and CDM together in the same Logged On session. Do not run FF pattern on ATTO. Default settings are ok. Run IOmeter with 4KiB 'sector' alignment. Do not run it to fill the drive. Do not use 'Full' Benchmarks more than once in the same Logged On session. Do not use any Benchmark (compressible data) more than once a week. Do not use any Benchmark (un-compressible data) more than once a month. Do not run Random patterns straight after Sequential or vice versa. Best to run inidividual tests with small file sizes and not full suite default." IOmeter is used for marketed sustained write speeds and IOPS.

Overall Review: Beware of benchmarking SSDs, especially sandforce-based SSDs. Benchmarking software does not reflect real world data usage; it writes a lot of data of all one type all at once. Usually a disk will see lots of different data- eg. maybe 40% sequential reads, 30% small random reads, 10% sequential writes, 20% small random writes. The drives can handle this fine. When you start benchmarking with all writes, SSDs slow down because they dont have time to run garbage collection or wear leveling as they are seeing 100% usage for long periods of time. Sandforce based drives will slow down on purpose to protect the NAND cells from excessive usage. It can take a few DAYS before they recover to the origonal speed, depending on how much you hammer them. You would never see this slowdown under regular usage; it is a

Pros: Better than HDD (obviously)

Cons: Did not work right away. I properly adjusted all my BIOS settings but the mobo would not recognize it. It recognized my HDD and Intel SSD w/o a problem. After checking all connections for the dozenth time or so, it just started working all of a sudden without me making any changes to my setup. I finally was able to install Win 7 Pro on it. All worked well for a day. This morning, it was not being detected again. I now get an orange light on the SSD. Tried different ports, cables...all to no avail; other SSD works on same port/connector. Very disappointed with this purchase. Gonna start the RMA process tomorrow, hopefully I won't have to pay a restocking fee.

Overall Review: Even when it worked (booted to Windows) my BIOS did not ever detect it properly (did not show up in bios screen, only on the post screens). I couldn't even set it's boot priority therefore. Very disappointed, my Intel SSD did not have these problems. I expected more from an OCZ product.

Pros: I have seen some DOA reviews, so I was happy when I powered up my computer and it worked. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 in less than 10 minutes and was up and running. Had latest 1.25 firmware on it. OCZ's forum has tons of information to answer any questions or concerns.

Cons: Doesnt come with a SATA cable so I was lucky I had a spare. Minor concern about longevity.

Overall Review: Enable AHCI mode in your bios to obtain advertised speeds. Disable defragmentation as this doesnt do any good on SSD's and can affect the longevity of the drive. There are some other tweaks you can do if you are an advanced user however Windows 7 pretty much takes care of the rest as it recognizes the SSD and supports TRIM to clean up your drive.

Pros: Very fast, 3.5" form factor (positive for me since it's for a desktop and I didn't want to deal with adapters; could be a negative for others, obviously this means it can't be installed in a laptop like most SSDs that use a 2.5" form factor).

Cons: Price, but performance costs money. And these drives have actually come down a lot in price lately. Expect further price drops with next-gen SSDs using 25nm flash on the way.

Overall Review: For best performance, make sure AHCI is enabled and the partition is correctly aligned (this is done automatically in Windows Vista and 7, in XP it needs to be done by the user). Also keep in mind that the SandForce controller uses some fancy compression to reduce the amount of data actually written to flash (this has two major benefits: Increasing effective write speed and reducing write amplification), so performance will depend on the compressibility of the data. ATTO uses highly compressible data, so with it you should see speeds very close to the advertised ("up to") transfer rates. Other benchmark tools may transfer less compressible data to the SSD, which results in lower transfer rates. For example, in ATTO I get about 270/250MBps sequential read/write. In the AS SSD benchmark, sequential read/write is about 200/130MBps.

Pros: Very fast, easy to set up.

Cons: Died after 1 year and 4 months.

Overall Review: I wouldn't purchase another one until they work out the bugs.

Pros: It's a fast drive and improved my desktop and gaming experience.

Cons: It failed on me at the worst time possible: the day before Diablo 3 launch. The motherboard won't recognize it after a year of use.

Overall Review: I'll no longer purchase OCZ products. This isn't the first time I've heard of their drives failing. Don't get fooled by the benchmarks on other sites.

Pros: Fast. (When it works)

Cons: I bought this in May 2011. It failed the 1st time in December 2011 when the BIOS would not recognize the drive. I went through the OCZ RMA process which was fairly painless other than the amount of time to get a replacement. The replacement failed in May 2012 in the same way. Fortunately, I kept my trusty Raptor as a backup and I have a fairly recent image of the SSD. I also have another mechanical drive for data only as I learned this lesson the hard way a long time ago. Based on my experience and from what I've read about the Vertex 2 series, OCZ has a real problem with this drive and they need to fix it. I'm just starting the RMA process again, so I will update this post with any problems I encounter. Even with all of the precautions I've taken to insulate myself from drive failures, It will still cost me a few hours to get back to normal.

Overall Review: OCZ. I assume you read these reviews. Do the right thing and fix the problem. I paid good money for this drive, so please don't send me (and others) another remanufactured SSD with the same bug that will fail again in a couple of months. I used to think OCZ was high quality, but now I'm not so sure.