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As the fourth generation of the legendary Vertex 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, and energy efficient storage solution compared to traditional hard drives. Designed to take full advantage of the SATA III interface, the Vertex 4 unleashes ultimate productivity, gaming, and multimedia applications.
Excelling in performance, no matter the file type
Mirroring real-world performance scenarios over a broad spectrum of consumer desktop and mobile applications, Vertex 4 SSDs are designed to provide a superior user experience and extreme performance over the other current solutions available on the market. With the cutting-edge Indilinx Everest 2 platform, Vertex 4 is optimized for consistent, high speeds with the complete spectrum of file types and sizes including both compressible and incompressible data for balanced performance like no other drive you've experienced.
Pros: - FAST! - Sata III - Recognized at boot (had already cleared CMOS before installation) - Absolutely no issues so far in terms of operation
Cons: - Slower speeds at lower queue-depths compared to other SSDs out there! - Idle power is higher than should be (1+ watt) compared to other SSDs out there OCZ mentioned on their forums that a firmware update will be coming soon to address both "issues" This is not a con but I also want to make light of the fact that this uses Marvell's silicon and NOT some cutting-edge Indilinx Everest 2 silicon which is what I personally thought this was (and according to some over at the OCZ forums I am not alone) but that OCZ wrote the firmware to Marvell's controller (hence the "INDILINX INFUSED..." phrase. It doesn't matter to me really because this is a great SSD and I love it...just wanted to shed some light because I know I was confused. If OCZ's and Marvell's close working relationship brings about the best consumer SSDs with performance and stability - then I'm all for it!
Overall Review: I'm typically not fond of writing quick reviews when having just received a product but since no one else has written one for this drive and I had to overcome some hurdles to get it fully working at optimal performance. I installed this into an older Alienware m17. I had initally cleared CMOS (recommended - plus I had a RAID 0 setup of 2xHDDs prior) and performed a fresh install of Windows 7. I couldn't find an explicit option to set the SATA mode to AHCI so I initially was running in IDE mode which the performance was lacking quite significantly. To make a long story short I had to enable RAID in the BIOS even though I wasn't going to have a RAID setup. In doing this the system will default back to a SATA mode of AHCI on its own - on next boot the AHCI chipset drivers were installed by Windows and a system restart made use of the AHCI driver. With AS SSD Benchmark my performance score went from an overall 314 to 656! Now I'm simply limited to the SATA II interface transfer speed :