OCZ unveils Vertex SSDs with 64MB cache

OCZ has officially announced its high performance Vertex Series Solid State Drive, with improved read and write transfer rates of up to 200MB/s and 160MB/s respectively and seek time of under 0.1ms. 

Despite using MLC technology, this series features a new architecture and controller design with up to 64MB onboard cache for faster transfers and improved system responsiveness with a wide range of software.  OCZ claims that this series costs significantly less per gigabyte than similar high speed drives offered by its competitors.

Other features include a durable lightweight alloy housing, shock resistance of 1500G, SATA II interface, mean time between failure of 1.5 million hours similar to enterprise hard disks and a 2 year warranty.  These drives will be available in capacities of 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB with suggested retail prices of US$129, US$249, US$469 and US$869, respectively.  The 30GB and 60GB models have 32MB onboard cache and the 120GB and 250GB models have 64MB onboard cache. 

According to OCZ, this new series will not replace any of its existing SSDs, but instead will complement them at the upper end of its performance range.  This means its series will consist of its Value series, Core series, Core series v2 and its new Vertex series. 

It will be really interesting to see how these perform in a review, considering these are the first SSDs with a significant on-board cache.  Our senior reviewer Wendy has already shown just how much of an improvement cache has with SSDs with the use of a PCI-e RAID controller containing 128MB of cache.  On the other hand, it is not clear at this time whether the full cache will operate in a write-back mode to cache write operations before they are physically written to flash.  When written data is cached, there is a risk of losing this cached data waiting to be written as a result of an unexpected power outage.