OCZ Technology 128GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry’s Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty – VTX4-25SAT3-128G
As the fourth generation of the legendary Vertex SSD 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.
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Designed to take full advantage of the SATA III interface, the Vertex 4 unleashes ultimate productivity, gaming, and multimedia applications. This model of the 2.5-inch Vertex 4 SSD (VTX4-25SAT3-128G) offers 128 GB of storage capacity, a 430 MB/s maximum sequential write speed, and 120,000 IOPS maximum I/O performance. It’s backed by a 5-year limited warranty.
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 consistently 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.
Key Features
Industry’s Highest IOPs
You’ll get incredible performance in workstation and heavy-duty environments with multiple data threads and performance up to 120,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced eye-ops).
No Compression-Related Performance Limitations
Better performance with “real world” data streams of varying “compressibility” as well as fully incompressible data such as videos and multimedia files, encrypted data, archive files such as .ZIP files, and software.
Indilinx Infused Everest 2 Platform
Its leading-edge, dual-ARM controller architecture enables faster performance like nothing else you’ve experienced.
Fast Boot Times and Ultra-Low Latency
Boot up in as little as 9 seconds, and industry-low latencies of .04 reads and .02 writes enable superior multitasking and flawless performance.
Ndurance 2.0 Technology
Advanced suite of NAND Flash management to increase durability and reliability to expand the NAND’s lifespan.
Industry-Leading Warranty
Limited 5 year warranty backed by OCZ’s renowned service (with toll-free tech support and 24-hour online forum support) for ultimate peace of mind.
Which OCZ Vertex 4 SSD is Right for You? |
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| VTX4-25SAT3-64G | VTX4-25SAT3-128G | VTX4-25SAT3-256G | VTX-25SAT3-512G | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | |||||
| Capacity | 64 GB | 128 GB | 256 GB | 512 GB | |
| Sequential Reads | 460 MB/s | 560 MB/s | 560 MB/s | 560 MB/s | |
| Sequential Writes | 220 MB/s | 430 MB/s | 510 MB/s | 510 MB/s | |
| Random 4k Read IOPS | 70,000 IOPS | 90,000 IOPS | 90,000 IOPS | 95,000 IOPS | |
| Random 4k Write IOPS | 50,000 IOPS | 85,000 IOPS | 85,000 IOPS | 85,000 IOPS | |
| Maximum IOPS | 85,000 IOPS | 120,000 IOPS | 120,000 IOPS | 120,000 IOPS | |
| Physical | |||||
| NAND Components | 2Xnm Synchronous Multi-Level Cell (MLC) | ||||
| Interface | SATA III / 6 Gbps (backwards compatible with SATA II / 3 Gbps) |
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| Form Factor | 2.5-inch | ||||
| NAND Controller | Indilinx Everest 2 | ||||
| DRAM Cache | Up to 1 GB | ||||
| Dimensions | 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm | ||||
| Weight | 83g | ||||
More Specifications
and extreme performance (view larger).
Reliability/Protection
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): 2 million hours
- Data Path Protection: ECC corrects up to 128 random bits/1KB
- Data Encryption: 256-bit AES-compliant, ATA Security Mode Features
- Product Health Monitoring: Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) Support
Compatibility
- Serial ATA (SATA): Fully compliant with Serial ATA International Organization (Serial ATA Revision 3.0) and ATA/ATAPI-8 Standard Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
- Operating System: Windows XP 32-bit /64-bit; Windows Vista 32-bit / 64-bit; Windows 7 32-bit / 64-bit; Linux; Mac OS X
Additional Features
- Performance Optimization: TRIM (requires OS support), dynamic and static wear-leveling, background garbage collection, Indilinx nDurance 2.0 Technology to extend SSD lifespan
- Other Performance Features: Ndurance 2.0 Technology (reduced write amplification without compression, advanced multi-level ECC, adaptive NAND flash management)
- Service & Support: 5-year warranty, toll-free tech support, 24 hour forum support
The SSD Advantage
Whether you’re refreshing an older laptop or trying to maximize the potential of the latest platform, SSDs provide substantial benefits over traditional hard drives.
Greater Durability
Solid State Drives feature a non-mechanical design of NAND flash mounted to circuit boards, shock resistant up to 1500g. Hard disk drives consist of various moving parts making them susceptible to shock and damage.
Faster Performance
SSDs have 100 times greater throughput and instantaneous access times for quicker boot-ups, faster file transfers, and overall snappier performance than hard drives. HDDs can only access the data faster the closer it is from the read/ write heads, while all parts of the SSD can be accessed at once.
Less Power Consumption, Silent Operation, and Lightweight
SSDs use significantly less wattage at peak load than hard disk drives–less than 2W versus 6W for an HDD–delivering longer battery life in notebooks, less power strain on system, and a cooler computing environment. With no moving parts, SSDs run virtually silent in your notebook or PC case to eliminate distracting noises during gaming or entertainment. And SSDs won’t weigh down your laptop, netbook, or tablet PC when you’re on the go.
SSDs run much cooler than hard disk drives…
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…and much quieter, too.
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$ 99.99
Good job OCZ,
OCZ’s new vertex 4 drive is probably the fastest current SSD under most common consumer usage purposes. It is blazing fast and has none of the BSOD issues of previous drives with the new Marvel/Indilinx controller. Therefore, OCZ is confident enough to give this drive a 5 year warranty. This is my second SSD and it blows the previous one out of the water.
The Vertex 4 has an amazing 120k input/output operations per second which is 40{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} higher than the Patriot Wildfire (one of fastest, most expensive, BSOD ridden Sandforce controlled drives). However, the sequential write is the one weakness of the Vertex 4. But keep in mind that 95+{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} (perhaps 99+{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3}) of the time you will be reading from the drive and the read speed is where you’ll see almost all of the speedup. Even if you write on the drive often, there are almost no sources you can draw from that will use up all of the write speed of any newer generation drive. If you are downloading from the internet (even if you are on a 100Mpbs T3 line) you won’t come close to the write speed of a standard hard drive. Alternatively, if you are writing to the SSD from a big data hard drive, the SSD write speed will definitely not be the bottleneck. The only time you will see speedups is with SSD to SSD writes (but how often do you do that?)
OCZ always had the lowest prices and fastest drives before but reliability was a significant issue. I’m glad they finally figured it out. You can now buy one of the cheapest drives out there (prices are comparable to Vertex 3) with speed and reliability. SSD’s sure have come a long way.
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Update 5/7/12
My drive still works perfectly and I just installed the new firmware so that the write speed more than doubled! The read speed also received a significant boost. This is the first time that I have become even happier with a purchase a few weeks in.
The new specs are:
550 MB/s read, 420 MB/s write for the 128 GB model
550 MB/s read, 465 MB/s write for the 256 GB model
550 MB/s read, 475 MB/s write for the 512 GB model
It seems like the SATA 3 interface is the limiting factor on the read speeds now. Because the firmware is so aggressive, it is destructive so that you must install it before you install your operating system or install it when the SSD is the slave drive.
The drive still blows away the competition on the IOPS and the random reads and writes on incompressible data which is almost an order of magnitude faster.
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|Great for macbook pro w/Lion!,
I bought this for my early 2011 macbook pro and mid 2009 mbp and it works great but there are some steps to getting the drive up to date and working.
Here are some instructions on what to do for people who want to know about making this drive work with the mbp (using Lion 10.7.4).
0. Backup all data you want from your old drive because you wont have it anymore after you remove it
1. take out old drive and replace with your new SSD (look for youtube videos on how to do this)
2. power on the laptop while holding the “option” key
3. connect the the internet and choose internet recovery
4. when you get into the install screen open disk utilities and select the drive
5. create a new (1 partition) and format your new drive as Mac OS Journaled
6. close disk utility and install Lion onto the drive
ok great now your drive is working and the OS is installed, but the drive is NOT updated to the latest firmware (helps to drive work at its best)
(just a warning this is more advanced)
7. goto OCZ’s website for the latest vertex 4 firmware (please read all their instructions on how to update, below is my self-experienced abridged version)
8. download their OCZ Tools utility and burn it to a disk (dvd or CD, i used toast to do this but you can use disk utility also-> for help google “burn iso image osx”)
9. restart computer holding option key again and choose to boot from the disk
10. wait for computer to reboot, your touchpad and Wifi wont work… so you need to plug in a USB mouse and connect via ethernet (MUST have net for this to work)
11. click the mac update tool on the bottom bar
12. make sure it is asking to update the vertex 4 (will say y/n)
13. say yes to setting to AHCI and do a normal update
14. after it is done it will ask you to press “S” and repeat the process 1 time as of 6/26/12 (start back @ step 9)
15. if everything is updated and everything is clear on being completed, shutdown the tool and restart the computer normally
16. YOU DID IT!!! easy right? enjoy instant loads and a now much cooler (temp.) and nearly silent laptop
The product itself is a 5 star product, just the installing and updating is not easy for a casual user hence the -1 star
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|Solid improvement in my system,
UPDATE 8/6/12
It’s been over a week since installation and I haven’t had a single problem. Any issues I mentioned in my review seem to have been one-offs and have not repeated themselves. As a result, and as promised, I’m bumping my rating up to 5 stars. I’ve also changed the title from “Solid but not overwhelming improvement in my system” to “Solid improvement in my system”, along with a few references to the title in the review itself.
I notice the price of this drive decreased by about 13{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} (my inventive way of indicating a price shift without getting filtered by Amazon) since I bought it about ten days or so ago. I’m not surprised since Samsung’s 840 Series drive at this same capacity recently dropped in price to where this Vertex 4 is now. The SSD market is highly competitive, and as drives get ever cheaper there’s less and less of an excuse not to pick one up.
In the past week I got around my instrument loading problem by switching to a mode that allows me to only load the attack portion of each sample to RAM and stream the remainder from the drive. Since SSDs excel at rapid access times (around 0.2 ms read access for the Vertex 4, versus around 9 ms for a standard desktop HDD) and random reads, this works far better than it did with any HDD I tried it on and gives me performance parity with simply loading the entire huge file into memory. Since I couldn’t have reasonably done this before I got my Vertex 4 I can’t in honesty say I have any complaints about my new drive.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
Note that I just received and installed this drive several days ago, and that this review is based on that experience. I plan on updating this space as time goes on.
EXPECTATIONS & GOALS
I bought this drive, after over a week of intensive research, so that I could hopefully load virtual instruments (VSTs) in my DAW faster. On a standard notebook HDD this can take over a minute depending on the instrument. Apart from that, I was interested in the usual benefits commonly associated with SSDs:
-Faster bootup
-Faster program launches
-Snappier performance (e.g. smoother multitasking, better UI responsiveness, etc)
-Faster Internet page loads
-Faster program installation
-An overall feeling of improved feedback and responsiveness (kind of everything listed above rolled together)
We’ll explore how well the Vertex 4 accomplishes all these points.
MY SYSTEM
I’m using this drive in a 2009-era HP dv6-1355dx, which came with the following:
-4 GB of DDR3 RAM (updated concurrently with the drive to 8 GB)
-2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor
-500 GB Fujitsu 5400 RPM 2.5″ HDD
-Intel 4 Series Express chipset
-Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
This system is definitely a bit long in the tooth, but it’s probably typical of what a lot of folks might have, and it should give a good indication what kind of improvement can be expected from a SSD.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
The Vertex 4 comes nicely packaged, with the drive seated in a protective layer of thick foam. In the box you’ll find a 2.5″-to-3.5″ adapter plate, four mounting screws, a quickstart guide, a fun “My SSD is faster than your HDD” sticker, and of course the drive itself, sealed in a stiff translucent plastic wrapper. If your box didn’t come with all this, assuming OCZ hasn’t changed its packaging for this drive, you might want to check with OCZ or the seller to make sure everything is okay.
Installation was simple. I had no trouble swapping the Vertex 4 for the HDD, and I was done in a little over a minute. The system POSTed with the drive installed, so all was well.
SETUP
Here’s where I met my first wrinkle. OCZ provides two separate utilities for updating the firmware on their drives: The OCZ Toolbox, which runs from within Windows, and OCZ Tools, which is a bootable Linux-based tool. Since I planned to do a clean install of Windows 7, I had already burned the OCZ Tools utility to a disc before I began. Loading this utility worked fine, but for some reason it couldn’t connect to OCZ’s server to download the latest firmware. Confusingly, it stated that there was no newer version available, when I knew very well that this was not true. The drive shipped with firmware 1.4.3, and the latest version (as of this writing) is 1.5.
Once I had Windows installed, updated, and had all my hardware configured properly, I attempted again, this time with the OCZ Toolbox. It also couldn’t update, producing a generic “file not found” type error. Several hours later I tried again, and this time I succeeded. I can understand servers being down. It happens. But I think OCZ should make it a little clearer in their utilities when it’s an issue with accessing and downloading the file, instead of confusingly stating that no newer file is available or…
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