OCZ Vertex SSD with latest firmware gets benched by AnandTech

Posted on Tuesday, March 31 2009 @ 0:27 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AnandTech has another update about the solid state disk market, Anand reports Intel has an update for its X25-M on the way to fix support in Apple's Bootcamp on NVIDIA-based Mac systems and he has also published some more benchmarks of the new OCZ Vertex and a SuperTalent UltraDrive ME SSD with the Indilinx Barefoot controller.. You can check it out over here.

Anand has benched the OCZ Vertex SSD with the 1275 firmware revision and reports random write performance has increased by more than 2.5x compared to the 0122 firmware while average latency is down from 4.86ms to 1.81ms. It's not as good as the Intel X25-M but the Indilinx Barefoot controller based Vertex is shaping up as a very good value alternative to Intel's SSD. Outside of Intel, solid state disk with the Indilinx controller seem to be the only ones worth buying right now. Those with JMicron controllers should be avoided at all cost.
My recommendation still stands: the Intel X25-M is by far the cream of the crop of the desktop SSD world. The Indilinx based drives have the potential to be good, lower cost alternatives to the Intel drive but you still have to approach them with caution. While the OCZ Vertex drive worked fine in my tests and on my testbed, this is a brand new drive with a controller from a company without a proven track record.

In the coming weeks I will be looking at the latest updates to Samsung’s MLC controller. While I haven’t been terribly impressed with the performance of Samsung drives thus far, they are at least reliable and compatible.

While I’ve heard that the JMicron based drives are no longer selling very well, it looks like at least a few manufacturers are going to be using the JMF602B controllers to deliver 512GB SSDs in the coming months. Buyer beware.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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