OCZ Vertex Plus with Indilinx Martini controller gets benched

AnandTech had the opportunity to test OCZ's Vertex Plus, a new solid state disk that adopts the Indilinx Martini SSD controller. Martini is a redesigned Barefoot controller, it promises better random write performance as well as a couple of other benefits. You can read the preview over here, the site has no final judgment as OCZ is still a few weeks away from release candidate firmware, but concludes disks based on Martini could be a good budget alternative to SandForce-based SSDs.

The controller is still technically called Barefoot, although it is a new hardware revision. Martini apparently refers to the firmware designed for this new rev of Barefoot (no, it can't be applied to older Barefoot drives). The Martini firmware and new Barefoot revision to work better with Intel's 34nm NAND. The 3Gbps controller is designed primarily to increase random write performance although there are other benefits along the way.

Spare area has increased. While the old Barefoot set aside ~7% of the NAND capacity for garbage collection and bad block allocation, Martini uses 10%. A Barefoot+Martini based drive with 128GiB of NAND will expose 115.2GiB of it to the user vs. 119.2GiB for Barefoot based drives. SandForce once told me that it expects all controller makers to begin setting aside more spare area and that seems to be the trend.