OCZ Vertex 460 (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 22, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Indilinx
- Vertex 460
The last few months have not been easy at OCZ. After long-lasting financial issues, the company filed for bankruptcy on November 27th and a week later Toshiba announced that it will be acquiring the assets for $35 million.
Yesterday OCZ announced that the acquistion has been completed and were finally able to shed some lights to the details of the deal. To my surprise, OCZ will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary and won't be integrated into Toshiba's own SSD team. I'm guessing Toshiba sees financial potential in OCZ and is hence keeping things as they are. The only change aside from the change of ownership is a new brand logo and name: OCZ is now called OCZ Storage Solutions to further emphasize the focus of the company. Last time I heard OCZ was looking for a buyer for its PSU business but it seems they've not found one yet.
Update 1/31: We finally have an official statement regarding warranties.
Update 2/1: OCZ has a buyer for its PSU division and we'll have more details in a couple of weeks. The RAM and cooling divisions have been discontinued a long while ago, though.
| Comparison of OCZ's Barefoot 3 Based SSDs | ||||
| Vector 150 | Vertex 460 | Vector | Vertex 450 | |
| Controller | Indilinx Barefoot 3 | |||
| NAND | 19nm Toshiba | 19nm Toshiba | 25nm IMFT | 20nm IMFT |
| Over-Provisioning | 12% | 12% | 7% | 7% |
| Encryption | AES-256 | AES-256 | N/A | AES-256 |
| Endurance | 50GB/day for 5 years | 20GB/day for 3 years | 20GB/day for 5 years | 20GB/day for 3 years |
| Warranty | 5 years | 3 years | 5 years | 3 years |
The Vertex 460 resembles OCZ's flagship Vector 150 a lot. In terms of hardware the only difference between the two is that the Barefoot 3 controller in the Vertex 460 is slightly lower clocked than the one in Vector 150. The Barefoot 3 in the Vector 150 runs at 397MHz while in the Vertex 460 it's clocked at 352MHz. The speed of the controller isn't proportional to the overall performance but there are scenarios (like intensive read/write workloads) where a faster controller will help.
Both drives actually use exactly the same NAND (identical part numbers) but each Vector 150 goes through more testing and validation cycles to make sure the higher endurance criteria is met. Even though the NAND should be the same in both drives, bear in mind that endurance specifications are always minimums -- one part can be more durable than the other as long as both meet spec. By doing additional validation, OCZ is able to pick the highest endurance parts and use them in the Vector 150, whereas lower quality chips (but good enough to meet the mainstream endurance requirements) end up in the Vertex 460.
The choice of identical NAND in both models is indeed odd but I'm guessing that Toshiba had a hand in this. The Vertex 450 used Micron's NAND but obviously Toshiba doesn't want to use a competitor's NAND in their products, hence the Vertex 450 is replaced with the 460 and Toshiba NAND.
| OCZ Vertex 460 Specifications | |||
| Capacity | 120GB | 240GB | 480GB |
| Sequential Read | 530MB/s | 540MB/s | 545MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 420MB/s | 525MB/s | 525MB/s |
| 4KB Random Read | 80K IOPS | 85K IOPS | 95K IOPS |
| 4KB Random Write | 90K IOPS | 90K IOPS | 90K IOPS |
| Steady-State 4KB Random Write | 12K IOPS | 21K IOPS | 23K IOPS |
Similar to the Vector 150, the Vertex 460 switches to 12% over-provisioning. This seems to be an industry wide trend and to be honest I'm happy with that. The few percents extra makes a huge difference in terms of IO consistency, which in the end accounts for a better user experience.
Test System
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K running at 3.3GHz (Turbo and EIST enabled) |
| Motherboard | AsRock Z68 Pro3 |
| Chipset | Intel Z68 |
| Chipset Drivers | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 4 x 8GB (9-9-9-24) |
| Video Card | Palit GeForce GTX 770 JetStream 2GB GDDR5 (1150MHz core clock; 3505MHz GDDR5 effective) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA GeForce 332.21 WHQL |
| Desktop Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| OS | Windows 7 x64 |
Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsX 32GB DDR3 DRAM kit
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jragonsoul - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
But they really aren't, OCZ is still OCZ and they are still making their own drives. I see that as a smart move by them because if Toshiba would have swallowed the company and they made some SSD's I know at least me and my tech friends would have stayed well and far away until EXTENSIVE reviews appeared.AssBall - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
OCZ had a bad run of drives and couldn't get it fixed. Years before that, they made excellent memory, and good PSU's. Their early SSD's were pretty good too. Being hung up on their screw up sounds like you can't get over personal issues. They will come back and be profitable again. Toshiba will help right the ship.Samus - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
Yep. Let's not forget those poor early adopters of MacBook Air's that were unlucky enough to end up with a Toshiba drive instead of a Samsung (Apple was using both vendors through production, so it was luck of the draw)Needless to say Apple doesn't use Toshiba SSD's much anymore, even with their bitterness with Samsung.
lmcd - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
"Much."So?
DarkStryke - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
You have some pretty nice revisionist history there. Take your own advice and learn about the history of OCZ, especially before the company incorporated under that title.I hear the overclockerz store had great customer service too!
Once a fool..
GTVic - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
My OCZ power supply died precisely after the warranty expired.random2 - Sunday, February 2, 2014 - link
You cannot blame a person for feeling that the OCZ name is a deterrent. Doesn't even have to be personal to want to see people avoid product that has not been good for years, hasn't been good through numerous models of drives, and has casued a great many people a lot of heart ache and frustration. All becasue OCZ couldn't bring themselves to make sure their product was viable and market ready BEFORE it went out their door.http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/component...
Go ahead....buy an OCZ drive.
AMRAAM_Missiles - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
Eventhough you make sense, that the company has a dark area which it lost the trust from a lot of people, it doesn't mean that it won't get better.My first ever SSD was the Vertex 4 from OCZ, and guess what, it is still regarded as one of the best Performance SSD that money could buy today. 3 solid years of grinding the OS with constants write and read, it shows no drop in performance. I am not saying that failures are not real, but it doesn't go the extend that people make it out to be.
Now, i have just bought another Vector and Vector 150 for my rig, and i couldn't be more happier with a role of a normal consumer and an enthusiast of PC in general. Sometime, people just have to hate for the sake of hating without even trying to open their eyes to verify the current situation a little bit.
JDG1980 - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
That was my thought, as well. The purchase of OCZ made sense, because they have some decent controller IP and Toshiba wasn't too strong in that area, but the OCZ name is dirt because of their horrendous record of reliability, so I have no idea why they wanted to keep that.Samus - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - link
I remember an interview Anand posted years ago with the CEO of OCZ, and Anand was pretty adamant about them ditching their name (for obvious reasons) and the CEO said they were going to keep it. That didn't work out so great for them. I don't see it working for Toshiba, either. They need to ditch the name and come up with another one, or just call it Toshiba.