While the initial implementations of 25nm in the Vertex 2 were not good (the jury is out still on the re-done Vertex 2), there’s no performance hiccup with the Vertex 3. Perhaps this is all the more impressive too because OCZ is using 25nm MLC NAND. While that shouldn’t be entirely surprising, it’s not just faster like, “Woo, it edged out the prior generation SF-1200 SSDs, yeah!” It’s faster like, “Holy that’s fast,” boasting 69% faster results in some of our real-world tests.

We’ll get into the details later in the review, but our numbers show it as clearly the fastest SATA SSD to hit our bench. We will update the review as OCZ issues firmware updates.īeta firmware or not though, the Vertex 3 is a scorcher. We should also note that our review drive is a late generation beta, but beta nonetheless. We have not yet updated our testbed to include a Sandy Bridge platform, so our tests are run through a LSI MegaRAID 9260 card to best recreate the desired environment. While the SSD is backwards compatible, the Vertex 3 really wants to be run in a Sandy Bridge (P67) 6Gb/s native SATA interface to achieve maximum performance. To be fair, there are a few caveats with the Vertex 3 and it’s best to lay those out up front. The spec sheet makes it sound fast, but is it the fastest SSD to be seen by our test bench?

By comparison to the Vertex 2, those top line read and write speeds are about 90% faster with the Vertex 3.

While the SF-2281 is the centerpiece, delivering quoted sequential speeds of up to 550MB/s read and 525MB/s writes, the updated SATA 6Gb/s interface deserves credit too. Well, it’s on now – SandForce has announced their new client SSD processor and OCZ is the first to jump – with their new Vertex 3 SSD.

Well, it’s on now – SandForce has announced their new client SSD processor and OCZ is the first to jump – with their new Vertex 3 SSD.

Ocz vertex 3 firmware