OCZ 256GB Vertex 4 Industry’s Highest I/O Performance Up to 120K IOPS SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive With 5-Year Warranty – VTX4-25SAT3-256G
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- Up to 535 MB/s Sequential Reads
- Up to 95,000 Random Write IOPS
- Up to 120,000 Maximum IOPS
- Access Latency as Low as 0.02ms
- Strong Performance at Lower Queue Depths
- Maximum IOPS 120K IOPS
- Random 4k Read IOPS 90K IOPS
- Random 4k Write IOPS 85K IOPS
- Sequential Reads Up to 550 MB/s
- Sequential Writes Up to 465 MB/s
As the fourth generation of the legendary Vertex line, 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. Designed to take full advantage of the SATA III interface, the Vertex 4 unleashes ultimate productivity, gaming, and multimedia applications. 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. The OCZ Vertex 4 2.5-inch SS
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OCZ 256GB Vertex 4 Industry’s Highest I/O Performance Up to 120K IOPS SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive With 5-Year Warranty – VTX4-25SAT3-256G
List Price: $ 279.99
Price:
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% 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+% (perhaps 99+%) 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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Crazy fast.,
It took me a while to justify spending the money on a SSD (Solid State Drive) but after watching countless youtube videos and reading reviews about how much faster they were than regular HDDs (Hard Disk Drive), I decided to get one. I had looked around and found a lot of Solid State Drives with good reviews, but among them OCZ’s Vertex line seemed to be the one that pulled out ahead in the benchmarks. Im glad that I decided on this one!
The drive has the highest IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) that I’ve seen online so far and it is based on OCZ’s own Indilinx controller. Their previous SSD the Vertex 3 was based on a Sandforce controller. When OCZ bought Indilinx in 2009, I guess one could guess that they would incorporate that technology into their future products and they did. Basically what this means is that every part of the drive is built and supervised by OCZ themselves. There isn’t any 3rd party hardware or software on the drive thats not from OCZ. In my opinion, this makes the drive more reliable.
PROS:
1. INSANELY FAST.
I installed it into my early 2011 13″ Macbook Pro replacing my old standard HDD and its baffling how fast my system as a whole has become. A fresh boot takes anywhere between 8-9 seconds almost every time! Compare this to the usual 55-60 seconds I was waiting around staring at my screen with my old HDD and you tell me which one you would choose.
Every application I click on instantly pops up and is ready for use; even large applications like iPhoto or Garageband load instantly. I even did what I saw on a youtube video and loaded about 20 applications at once and they all started popping up instantly with everything loaded within 7-9 seconds. Crazy.
2. SET UP IS A BREEZE
If you aren’t familiar with the steps involved in taking out the hard drive and popping in the solid state I would suggest just searching youtube. I did it for my Macbook Pro and after unscrewing all of the little screws which were a pain everything else was really easy. Unlike another review I saw, my Mac immediately recognized the drive and I was able to format it and install a fresh version of OSX Lion. I can’t speak for other PCs but I would assume that almost any computer would have no problem recognizing the drive.
IMPORTANT: Make sure you have a backup of your data if you want everything to be exactly the same on your new SSD. I backed up all of my stuff to an external hard drive, installed the new SSD and used Migration Assistant to get all of my files, music, photos, etc. back onto the new SSD which took about 25 minutes total, but the time it takes depends on how much data you have. So if you have tons of photos, music, videos, and other files that your transferring don’t blame the drive if it takes longer than that!
3. SILENT, BUT DEADLY
As opposed to an HDD which has a spinning disk inside of it, an SSD has no moving parts and therefore makes no noise. So my laptop is completely silent, which is pretty cool. The only thing I can hear if I go in real close is the slow whir of the fan.
CONS
1. SHIPPING
The only problem I had with this is my drive (which i was so excited to receive mind you) got lost by USPS. After contacting Amazon they said that they would send another one out free of charge and with free one day shipping. So kudos to Amazon.
If you are contemplating whether or not you should make the jump to an SSD my advice would be to do it. God as my witness, I promise there will be no regrets. The speed increase is extremely noticeable and everything you do on your computer will be snappier than ever.
I’ve also included some links to optimizing your system to get the most out of your SSD for both Mac and Windows users.
Windows: […]
Mac: […]
* Also if anyone is wondering if the installation of an SSD will void any Apple warranty, it does not. In the booklet you get when you purchase your mac it tells you which parts are user replaceable. In my case the RAM and Hard Drive were listed as user replaceable. The warranty does not however cover anything you break while you’re messing around in your machine so as long as you don’t break anything you should be good. Just double check what parts are listed as user replaceable in your booklet.
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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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