Introduction, Specifications, and Packaging

We check out two different firmware revisions for the new Vertex 4

Introduction

OCZ has been in the SSD game for quite some time now. Their first contender was the OCZ Vertex, which we reviewed back in Febuary of 2009. While the original Vertex was powered by an Indilinx BareFoot controller, the Vertex line switched over to SandForce for the second and third generations. The fourth generation brings Indilinx back to the Vertex, this time with the Everest 2. You may recall Everest made its first appearance in the OCZ Octane, which has already proven itself to be a solid contender in the market.

Before we get into the meat and portatoes, we’ll kick this off by saying this will not be a typical Vertex 4 review. We had benches run on 512GB and 256GB Vertex 4 samples, but the numbers we were seeing seemed ‘off’, so OCZ provided me with an alpha/engineering level firmware late last night. I suspect most other reviews you read today will include results from the 1.30 initial shipping firmware, or perhaps from the 1.31 bugfix firmware (which corrected an issue with secure erasure), but this piece will cover both 1.30 and a newer 1.52 interim build. Sometimes it’s necessary to burn the midnight oil in the interest of presenting the full picture (or one as complete as possible) to our readers, and this was one of those pieces. We will revisit the Vertex 4 again very soon in the form of a more final product review, but for now we’ll go with what we’ve got.

Read on for the full review!

Specifications

128GB:

  • Max Read: 535MB/s
  • Max Write: 200MB/s
  • Random Read IOPS: 90,000 (4K QD32)
  • Random Write IOPS: 85,000 (4K QD32)
  • Max IOPS: 120,000 (512B Random Read, Iometer 2010)
256GB: 
  • Max Read: 535MB/s
  • Max Write: 380MB/s
  • Random Read IOPS: 90,000 (4K QD32)
  • Random Write IOPS: 85,000 (4K QD32)
  • Max IOPS: 120,000 (512B Random Read, Iometer 2010)

512GB:

  • Max Read: 535MB/s
  • Max Write: 475MB/s
  • Random Read IOPS: 90,000 (4K QD32)
  • Random Write IOPS: 85,000 (4K QD32)
  • Max IOPS: 120,000 (512B Random Read, Iometer 2010)

As you can see the only gradient in specs comes from the write speed rating. All other claimed specs are identical regardless of capacity.

Packaging

The Vertex 4 came with standard OCZ packaging, including a 3.5" adapter bracket and mounting hardware.

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