OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Solid State Drive Review

Looking back on our previous experiences of the Vertex series of drives from OCZ, their performance both on paper and in the real world tests has always been very impressive and this new version continues the saga with blistering performance.

As mentioned back at the start of the review, the Vertex 4 is the first in the Vertex line up to move away from a Sandforce based controller and now using the Indilinx Everest 2 controller is clearly the way forward for the Vertex series. With the controllers effectively being produced in house, we should hopefully  be seeing reduced manufacturing costs and this will hopefully pass on down to the end user in time. We do note that at this moment in time, all the available capacities will be shipped with the full 1GB of DDR3 DRAM and this has been done in order to ensure that the drives will be available on the shelves at the time of release. With this we will expect the lower capacity drives to not utilise the full 1GB of memory and in the near future these drives will potentially drop down to 512MB instead.

We’ve seen throughout our testing, especially in the likes of AS SSD and Crystal Disk Mark, speeds that show that the Vertex 4 is right up there with the top rated drives on the market, and this is no real surprise when we look back to the Vertex 3. Any drive that easily pushes through toward the 500MB/s barrier in real world situations is clearly a winner in my eyes.

Noting that the Vertex 4 now runs with the Everest 2 controller and the foresight of cheaper manufacturing costs, the drive comes at a very affordable price of £119.99 especially when marked against the earlier Vertex 3 which still retails for around the £108 mark. This to me makes for a no brainer decision when choosing which of the Vertex lineup to buy and considering the performance and capacity per pound that you’re going to spend, there is no choice to be made between the two respective drives.

Following on from the Vertex 4, I can only but hope that we will be seeing a max IOPS strain come out of the OCZ labs in the near future which will take this drive to a whole new level and take it from an extreme level of performance to a level that we have yet to see from the Vertex series and one that will, like the Vertex 4 against the slightly older 3, will give the Vertex 3 Max IOPS a great run for its money.