OCZ Vertex LE (Limited Edition) 2.5" 50GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-1VTXLE50G

Pros: Fast - though my speeds underperformed a bit at 210 read, and 200 write, Dell 530 motherboards are not well designed around SSDs, even when using Windows 7.

Reasonable price - Bought at $150, and a year later a similar model has only dropped to $100. Less expensive and faster than comparable Intel models

The boost it gave my system was noticeable, not only with load times and file transfer but also with game stability and framerate. My previous hard drive bottle-necked nearly everything.

Cons: Dead - It "bricked" after 7 months. When a drive bricks, it is dead beyond all retrieval. It began with constant blue screens a few minutes after startup and then quickly bricked and could not be reformatted.

Overall Review: Luckily I knew about the 3-year warranty. Sent the drive in and got a Vertex 2. Here is to hoping it lasts for awhile. I am also glad I was only using this as an OS drive (and still am with the Vertex 2). Otherwise, all my data, some of which I have been collecting for ten years, would have been irretrievable.

My advice is to always have an OS and data drive. It is the most convenient (and inexpensive) way of avoiding data loss.

Pros: - Read speed - 269MB/s write speed 215MB/s
- Sandforce controller
- Trim + Garbage collection
- Boot my PC in under 25 seconds
- Loads into windows within 10 seconds after windows 7

Cons: Expensive
Cannot be securely erased without firmware update. But..
Firmware update issues; see other thoughts

Overall Review: I have three of these drives; they all post similar speed benchmarks. But...
If you update the firmware to the latest version, 1.11, expect to see a POST error message about "smartdrive failure" which is strange because the release notes suggest that is the problem the firmware is intended to solve.

The untouched drive with the 1.01 firmware won't post the error message and, therefore is a second or two faster on bootup. However, without the firmware update, you cannot securely erase the drive using the hdparm command in Linux, which is the best way to restore any SSD drive to factory performance. For instructions, search "ATA secure erase wiki" on Google.

Pros: quick bootup, light and quiet

Cons: on standby or sleep mode. pc freeze when wake up.

Pros: Fast, quiet, cool... though true for almost all SSDs.
Great performance on Snow Leopard, benchmakrs in comments.

Cons: -Not a plug and play experience with OSX. For best performance, you have to dig into the terminal to enable noatime, disable SMS, etc.
-Because of size, you have to carefully pick and choose what to put on the drive.

Overall Review: Installed in an Optibay with a 500gb Western Digital 5400rpm drive.
Results (SSD first):
Start Time: 32 sec >> 54 sec
Google Chrome: .5 sec >> 2 sec
iTunes: 2 sec >> 10 sec
WoW Load Dalaran: 11 sec >> 37 sec

Pros: - Performs better than advertised ( with proper setup ) @
290 MB/s - Read
275 MB/s - Write

through ATTO Benchmark (Industry Standard Tool)

Cons: - The only con is:

If you dislike doing more than just plugging it in and getting the usual lightning fast SSD speeds.

Overall Review: There are guides on www.ocztechnologyforum.com for getting the advertised speeds: Basic (97% performance) and then Advanced (the Extra 3%) tutorials are easily found on their forums so please go there to setup your drive.

Also purchasing from OCZ means you get some of the most amazing Customer Support I've seen from a company. They have an extremely active community over there and alot of people who know what they are talking about when it comes to SSDs.

Basic Setup Tutorial: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?72945-Advanced-User-Windows-7-Complete-Installation-Guide-For-SSD-s-%28for-normal-use-most-of-these-tweaks-are-NOT-needed

(Follow the steps in red)


Advanced Setup Tutorial: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?73809-Advanced-Power-User-or-Enthusiasts-Guide-To-Install-Windows-on-your-OCZ-SSD-Product******Please-read-carefully!

Pros: Very fast. It makes me shiver every time I start up my MacBook Pro, and it only takes 7 revolutions of the wheel to load. Or if I start up Windows 7, only 2 heartbeats. I love the silent and cool operation.

Cons: Not really a non-expected con, but size. I'm not getting the 250MB of read/write performance that's specified. I get 120MB or so with Xbench, but I don't trust Xbench that much. Windows 7 gets a 7.1 with it.

Overall Review: Size is what got me at the end. I'm dual booting Windows 7 and OSX. If you just want to use this as a boot drive, then you should be fine. I just tried loading up my standard applications such as Office 2007, iLife, and iWork. It's full. Windows Update eats up space like a fat kid in a candy store. I would go from 3.5GB free to nearly 200MB with just a few updates. Of course the space would come back eventually, but that's too close for comfort.

I just ordered the Agility 2 120GB SSD on the Shell Shocker on 7/28/2010. I'll see how that goes.

Pros: great speed, great bandwidth, and latency .2ms
even in XP 32bit its access speed is adequate for running photoshop CS4 and all that jazz
OS loads to desktop ready to click and roll (from time os loader screen appears) about 5 seconds
boot screen takes longer but is not included in time
SANDFORCE-1222 chipset is simply amazing
OCZ claims it is an enterprise class SF-1500 with features disabled

Cons: GET the Extended version that has 7% GC 60GB
XP does not support TRIM because M$ refuses to incorporate simple driver update to the kernel of older OS so that they can collect dollars for poor W7 upgrade
thus speeds went from blank unformatted 50gb disk @230mb/s linear read across the entire drive to 130mb/s linear read across entire disk except the spike 225mb/s on the MFT set by XP NTFS

Drives should come prealigned to preferred settings of 128sectors etc

1.05 Firmware -- Had to download a 90mb bios update to get 1.10

Smart shows usual failures due to firmware problems
200+ bad sector reallocation -- temp misreading
1.10 actually shut off the smart temp sensor!

Overall Review: overall satisfied, will recommend the OCZ VERTEX 2 series to anyone
LE, E, or Standard just get one and do it properly with W7 Pro x64 TRIM
for small disks use it as your boot and programs
put all temp files that are garbage on your larger disk (first partition)
for your larger ssd just be sure not to defragment or "wash" --- write 0 & 1 to the empty space as this degrades the overall lifetime of the NAND flash

hope these pointers are useful for you guys

BTW, reported OCZ speeds are 2 ssd in raid 0 on a separate PCI-X raid controller using ATTO

Pros: boot times are significantly fast, apps install fast; firefox pops up instantaneously; win 7 x64 installs in 7 min

Cons: small size,

Overall Review: i'm buying another to setup raid 0