OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD – Preview

OCZ Technology was kind enough to send me an engineering sample of the Vertex 3 240GB SSD for preview. The OCZ Vertex 3 is a native SATA 6Gbps solution and sports the brand new SandForce SF-2281 SSD processor coupled with 25nm MLC NAND manufactured by Micron. I ask you to keep in mind that the engineering sample I have received may not contain the final version of the PCB or hardware, and the firmware is of course a BETA, that is for sure still being optimized, so you can perhaps expect even better performance from the retail Vertex 3.

In this preview I will run a good number of tests so everyone can see what the Vertex 3 is capable of doing, and will follow this up with a full review once the Vertex 3 goes retail, and the drive is available for end consumers to purchase.

SandForce came from nowhere last year and took the SSD market by storm with their SF-1200 series SSD processor. In a single swoop they managed to saturate SATA 3Gbps, and not only that, the SF-1200 series had mighty impressive small random file writing performance, excellent durability, and is still present in the review PC as I write this article. The question that most of you will want answered now is, can the Vertex 3 and its SandForce SF-2281 SSD processor surpass what is already an extremely high performance bar set by the Vertex 2?

I speculated back in December 2010 that we would see a consumer version of the SandForce SF-2000 family of SSD processors, and guessed that these new processors would be designated the SF-2200 series. What I didn’t bargain for then was for the SF-2281 to make it to the market so soon in 2011. However, it’s here now, and the NDA is now lifted, so I can now show you a preview of the brand new OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

We’ll find out in this preview how this new SSD performs in our range of benchmarks and real world tests.

OCZ company information

I’m sure most MyCE members will be familiar with the OCZ brand name. OCZ Technology has been manufacturing high performance, high quality PC memory, PSU units, SSDs, and other PC related hardware for many years.

If you would like to find out more about OCZ Technology, you can visit the OCZ website.

The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself and what the drive came shipped with.

The package contained the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD itself, which has a user capacity of 223GB when used with Windows 7. It’s an engineering sample, so the case still doesn’t have the Vertex 3 label, but below I have a marketing picture of how the retail product may look.

Drive bottom

Once again, the back of the drive doesn’t have a great deal of information to show you. We can see a label with what I suspect is a part number, and that the drive is a marketing sample. We can also see the SATA power and data connector.

Now let’s head to the next page, where we look in more detail at the OCZ Vertex 3.