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.