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The OCZ Vector SSD, the first 100pc in-house drive

by Alistair Lowe on 27 November 2012, 17:00

Tags: OCZ (NASDAQ:OCZ)

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It feels like only yesterday OCZ's Vertex 4 was released into the market and, by hardware standards, it was, with release happening just seven months ago. It had since been uncovered that despite the Indilinx Infused branding of the Vertex 4, at its heart was a Marvell controller, running OCZ home-brew firmware.

Wishing to detach itself completely from dependence on other firms and build a true name for its Indilinx brand, OCZ has, at full pace, worked to bring us its latest product, the OCZ Vector. It is the first solid-state drive (SSD) from the firm that is entirely unreliant on hardware from other parties, aside from the NAND flash, of course.

OCZ Vector SSD

Our first thoughts were, Apple iPhone-rectangle-patent-infringement lawsuit, however, after we got past this little niggle, we realised that the drive itself looked quite sleek and this is reflected by a rather thin 7mm product height. More importantly, however, are this product's internals and at the core sits OCZ's new Indilinx Barefoot 3 architecture.

OCZ Vector Core

Alas, until the SATA International Organisation pulls its finger out, no matter how SSDs progress we're still seeing the SATA 6Gb/s interface in-place. Get past this and the Barefoot 3 now offers a dual-core configuration, based upon ARM Cortex technology and, most importantly, a 100 per cent home-brew OCZ Aragon co-processor. Barefoot 3 also features a dedicated randomiser, ECC hardware and supports eight channels of Toggle NAND flash, which, in the instance of the Vector, is 25nm flash from IMFT (Micron and Intel joint-venture).

The focus on the OCZ Vector is sustained performance rather than peak speeds, according to the firm, and it will be interesting to see how it compares against Samsung's 840 Pro and Corsair's Neutron GTX range, to name but two.

The drive will be available in the following configurations and recommended pricings, and this includes a bundled copy of Acronis True Image HD and a 3.5in desktop adapter:


Vector 128GB Vector 256GB Vector 512GB
Sequential Read (MB/s) 550 550 550
Sequential Write (MB/s) 400 530 530
4KB Random Read (IOPS) 90,000 100,000 100,000
4KB Random Write (IOPS) 95,000 95,000 95,000
MSRP ($) 149.99 269.99 559.99

The number stack up nicely against the competition, it has to be said, and we look forward to providing you with the full review in the near future.



HEXUS Forums :: 20 Comments

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This looks awesome and should be if OCZ is able to pull its act together, the dedicated randomizer which is necessary for high security encryption could mean it could see some use in the enterprise market, maybe under a different branding with different NAND flash. The Sata 3 interface will mean nothing, SSDs are all about access times and if you want high throughput then you go for RAID. I also like the fact they are going after sustained write speeds rather than random, I hope they hold up with large queue depths.
Awesome news imo, never owned an OCZ SSD but I can appreciate good competition which helps prices. Still think I'm gonna get a Samsung 840 for xmas (my present to myself :P).

The Samsung 840 Pro has a 5 year Warranty which is worth alot for me and the price has dropped in the past few days to Ā£197.10 Inc VAT (scan.co.uk) which is nearly a tenner off since last week :D
I hate to bring it up again, but - what's with pc? Is the % button broken? The first 100pc in-house drive means something totally different to the first 100% in-house drive, especially on a computer (PC) forum. I was expecting a drive that could boot up to 100 PCs simultaneously within a building! :p
Sounds great, almost as fast as the 840 Pro, let's hope it is a bit cheaper.
I thought it meant 100 piece, had to read a bit of the article to realise it meant % haha