OCZ Introduces 2.5″ Vertex Series SSD
OCZ now unveils its 2.5” Vertex Series Solid State Drive (SSD) featuring Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. 30/60GB Vertex is equipped with 32MB of cache, and 120/250GB SSD offers 64MB of cache.
Most of SSDs offer no cache for now, and which offers like Intel SSD is quite expensive. Therefore, the appearance of OCZ Vertex Series SSD is a good stimulation to SSD market. But it’s a bit confusing that their capacities are 30GB/60GB/120GB/250GB, not multiples of 32GB.
“The new Vertex Series of SSD drives are a premium MLC based SSD solution premium MLC based SSD solution that are designed for consumers that require fast, rugged, and reliable solid state storage,” commented Eugene Chang, Director of Product Management for the OCZ Technology Group. “The Vertex makes use of our newest architecture and controller design complete with 64MB of cache to offer faster transfers and superior overall system response times in a broad range of applications and games.”
Vertex features SATA 3.0Gbps interface, and provides amazing read/write speed of 200/160MB per second which is very close to the speed of SSD featuring SLC. The read/write speed of Intel X25-E 32GB is 240/170MB per second, with price of $700. Perhaps this comparison can give you an idea of how much Vertex would impress us.
The MTBF of Vertex is 1.5 million hours. Available in a few weeks, the price of 30/60/120/250GB Vertex SSD is $129/249/469/869 respectively. Besides, Vertex SSD offers 2 years warranty.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
2 year warranty on a product at this price doesn’t cut it. Most of the manufacturers of these reccommend you disable your swap file because the drive can’t handle it long term. You’re not supposed to defragment these for the same reason it won’t handle a pagefile. These products have a long way to go before they match the value of current hard drives in all but laptops, and even then I’d still rather have a regular drive.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:59 am
Yeah that is kinda a short warranty period. But I dont see this as a problem, the only real use for these are performance, and talking performance there will be something better within 2 years and I will have it, and these will be in a friends or family members PC by then. Personally I want four of these in RAID0 on my Adaptec 5405. If they work flawlessly for at least 2 years I will be happy.
December 14th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
If you only see these from a performance standpoint it remains to be seen if this version will fix the freezing issues people are having with these drives. It is no accident that a new controller was mentioned since the previous versions have had controller issues. If it’s going to freeze up every so often then the real transfer rate is similar to that of other drives anyway, with less annoyance and far less cost. These drives also require major reconfiguration of your system to properly operate, OCZ has quite a list of things they suggest you do to optimize your experience with them.
A big advantage of these drives is shock tolerance. They really are well suited for laptops for that reason. They also use less power, increasing battery life.
I understand OCZ’s point of view on the two year warranty, that’s where the product is at right now. It wouldn’t be profitable for them to support them any longer than that, and you’re right that in two more years this product will have advanced a long way, perhaps even into upper mainstream use. You shouldn’t expect more than two years from these drives, despite what they may tell you the warranty period says it all. Price for performance when taking into account current problems with this technology makes them a horrible value.
With all of that said, if price is not a concern, then you could try it. I’d be hesitant to reccommend these if you want them to work flawlessly or if stability is your main concern. You can find a lot of evidence all over the internet including OCZ’s site that will suggest to you that while OCZ is doing everything it can to develop and support this technology there are still a lot of issues that are being fixed… with new revisions of hardware that you’ll end up buying. It’s an expensive way to go to get mixed results.
Perhaps no more expensive than other high end storage solutions right now, but with less reliability and perhaps less performance in the end due to the issues they currently have.
For the laptop user it’s a different story, and some minor issues, reconfiguration, and high price might be worth the performance, longer battery life, and shock tolerance. I’m really looking forward to this tech when it matures. With the hard drive being the slowest part of any computer I’d really like to have a SSD that really works… for a reasonable price.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Pending a few reviews these are likely to be the biggest deal since sliced bread. OCZ is putting themselves in our minds as a company commited to tech support as well as SSD product releases.
It makes no sense at all to freak out about the fact that you should never defragment these drives. They don’t require it, their performance is not enhanced by this tedious process. Defragging is a horrible nuissance, and a trick to enhance mechanical drive’s performance (to help reduce the handicaps). Complaining about the no-defrag is like complaining about being able to use crutches while you run.
So many people want to paint the old technology as unblemished, you can’t see the blemishes on mechanical hard drives because you’ve been living with them for so long.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This situation is analogous to when LCDs came into the scene. We are past the initial stage, the $1200 drives that can best be described as experimental (same with LCDs 15″ ones were $900+ at the beginning). With LCDs we immediately noticed ghosting and all kinds of other stuff, but we were so used to CRTs that we weren’t being fair. CRTs flickered and literally caused migraine headaches, they are bad for eyes! They also couldn’t go beyond 24″ on a desktop and even a 24″ CRT was abysmal in terms of weight and footprint. They are dim (225 nits was about as bright as they got)and require low light conditions to view them. When you look at a CRT monitor today, the mind boggles at how it ever tolerated such an aberration (particularly for reading fuzzy text).
Now, back to hard drives. 8ms seek vs 0.3ms seek. Ouch!
Can we just admit that better days are ahead of us? Having to change many settings is no reason to hate on this technology. Most of the things you have to disable on Vista are tricks that it was using to minimize mechanical hardrives’ sluggishness. (Vista doesn’t suck by the way, SSDs simply weren’t on the scene yet). Microsoft hasnt released a statement that SSDs are junk, they have issued a statement that Windows 7 will be optimized for SSDs.
So some tweaks will get you running fine on Vista today, and Windows 7 will run even better.
The price/performance of these hard drives opens up a can of worms. This is a very significant release. Enthusiasts should and will take notice and purchase these.
If anything the required tweaks (if they are even still required after this release) simply makes them that much more appealing to enthusiasts.
These are cheaper than raptors. Raptors are power hungry (power supply upgrade), are noisy (noise is unpleasant, and that’s a cost) and desktop only. With these drives, you just buy the drives, period. Maybe you’ll need a nice eSata card a hard drive enclosure for your old harddrive, but besides that you’re good to go.
These sizes are geeky though, 30GB is definitely a restricted amount for Vista. But RAID them and you have a decent enough (size-wise) boot partition.
The 30GB version is a good stocking stuffer ($129). You can use it to get familiarized with the technology. It’s a great novelty item. By the end 2009, 60GB high performance SSDs will be bellow $100.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
LOUDER SON!
December 16th, 2008 at 12:15 am
First and foremost, OCZ is a good comapny and the effort that they are making with these products reflects that. This unfortunately will not stop many who did not do their homework from holding the problems with earlier releases of the product against them.
While its cool to hate these days, having to reconfigure your system shows some of the weakness of the current design. If these drives still cannot handle defragmentation and pagefile usage then there are still serious issues. It doesn’t have anything to do with performance. In fact, not having to defragment these drive is one of the advantages of these drives over mechanical hard drives. One of the best uses of a very low seek time would be as a pagefile especially in a laptop where RAM is a limited resource or in a server where its practically guaranteed to happen. Both of these applications need reliabilty, however, and the bottom line is that if the process of rearranging files on the drive is a problem then the drive has a problem performing its duty, especially in a RAID environment.
Compared to mechanical hard drives these are a poor value. For 15 cents a gigabyte you can get reasonable speed with a five year warranty that requires little to no reconfiguration and can handle the way today’s operatings systems run. There’s no contest there.
Moving on to a Raptor increases the cost to a little less than a dollar per gigabyte. A raptor uses about 6 watts, it doesn’t need a new power supply. These SSD’s provide superior performance at about four times the cost per gigabyte, but you sacrifice warranty and they have known limitations. Still, for the enthusiast, these will be bought, espically at this price. For someone who doesn’t have a raptor and would be considering this or a raptor as a primary system drive, the raptor is still the smarter choice.
Once you move beyond SATA, these just don’t hold up in terms of reliability.
Windows 7 is still a long way off and OCZ will release another version of these before then. You’re not buying these for Windows 7. At $129, the 30GB does make a nice little gift this season, though, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t call it a stocking stuffer at that price, though.
Yes, better days are ahead of us, but they aren’t here yet.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I think OCZ is doing a great job. They’ve got a much quicker product development cycle than intel. I have no doubts that they will be able to stay a step ahead of goliath.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I agree about these type of drives in general not being such a good idea for a desktop “IF” you are only doing one drive and it happens to be a plagued drive with a jmicron controller without any on board cache. But as far as I know everyone who has these ssd drives on a descent hardware raid controller in a raid array have completely gotten rid of any of the noticeable stuttering issues or freeze ups. Also, as I said before I plan to use them in RAID on my Adaptec 5405 which happens to be a very well built high quality raid controller with 256 Mb of cache. I have run 4 Raptors now since they were first conceived (and countless other scsi drives) and retired them every year or so only to replace them with newer versions. I now have 4 Velociraptors in raid 0 and my best friends raid 0 array consisting of 4 cheap OCZ Core v2′s just kill my setup in terms of performance by nearly three times. He NEVER experiences any kind of stuttering or freezes as you have described, mainly due to his high quality raid controller. Unlike some people I know, I have chosen to wait for a better product myself, ie 250MB/s Intel’s, or the upcoming 220MB/s Samsungs or this new 200MB/s OCZ vertex. I surely will not be purchasing these without seeing some trusted reviews, but at $129 (1/3rd the cost of the Intel’s with nearly the same performance? A no brainer here) I will surely be ready to hit the purchase now button. All I need is some reviews or users in forums testing them and sharing their results. If they show to be an improvement, even a slight one at that, fast, and minus the previous flaws, well like I said “I will have it”. The fine tuning needing to be made in previous Operating Systems is a small price to pay especially considering how easy it is to do and what the end result will be. I am an official Microsoft software beta tester and already using Windows 7, and I can tell you first hand Windows 7 will be 100% ready for Solid State without the need for any so called tricks or fine tuning. In fact, I am scheduled to review the first official beta of Windows 7 in early 09 and I can promise you I will be installing 7 on a solid state drive, no question about it. 2009 is the year we see major adoption of SSD, and since I have been an early adopter since the beginning of computers, I feel I have waited long enough for a faster storage subsystem. Mechanical just does not do it for me anymore, they have been here far too long even longer than the floppy drive and look how we treat that now… lol, I can’t remember the last time I used a floppy drive.
Bring it on OCZ you have my full support and some enthusiastically crossed fingers
December 16th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
SkOrPn is exactly the type of user that wants and needs this product at its current level of development and price.
Certainly everyone is not in the same situation. As far as major adoption of these drives go, that depends on how you define major adoption. The vast majority of the installed base of computers and even laptops will not see SSD technology until well past 2009. If, by major adoption, you mean among people like yourself, I would say thats correct, provided the drives can avoid the problems they have had in previous revisions. You’ve got to understand that people like you do not represent the majority.
Many people believe that once a new technology comes out that everyone adopts it. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. An absolutely stupid number of people are still on XP, or even previous versions of Windows. Lots of people still have IDE hard drives, AGP video cards, and so on. I know that these are things someone like SkOrPn would die if he had to use again. Many businesses still have not and have no real plans to migrate to Vista yet.
This means that the upgrade market is unfathomably large. The only thing is that the vast majority of these people with older equipment are going to choose value over anything else, and it will be a long time again before they choose to upgrade. You can’t sell Joe Average a 30GB SSD drive as his only drive for $129 when he can get 500GB for $70. That $50 is real likely to go toward the video card or processor when he can get three more years out of the drive for less money and get more space. There’s a long way to go before we reach “sliced bread” level or “major adoption”.
I would love to think I’d never see a Jmicron or VIA controller again.
December 17th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Quote: “I would love to think I’d never see a Jmicron or VIA controller again.”
We are in agreement Sir!
I don’t think everyone needs a 500GB drive if all they do is surf the net and check email, but just about everyone understands what “faster computer” means. $129 is the initial launch price which will surely go down quick. One year ago this same capacity ssd drive would have costed $1200 and the year before nearly $3k, now its $129 and three to four times the speed and reliability. So what will another six months to a year bring at this same rate of improvement? $59.95 for a 640GB SSD perhaps, $110 for a 1280GB drive? As we speak sub-50nm NAND dies are in the works which will not only double the capacity, it will by a large margin lower the cost of manufacture. Only time will tell…
But I agree with Nice at what price, most average consumers have no clue what a hard drive really does let alone how it affects the computers performance. All they know is WOA $129 for 30GB OR 500GB for $70, not much of a decision for the average consumer, especially in this economy. For someone who downloads music and movies constantly the 500GB is the only way to go, although even 500GB is to small by today’s standards. Micron is releasing 640GB and 1280GB SSD drives in 2009 that run up to 2 million IOPS, that’s 1000 times the speed of an average 500GB $70 drive. The cost is probably astronomical and surely out of the reach of the average consumer, but the point is SSD is already catching up in terms of capacity. Experts say 2010 is the year we see “major adoption” of solid state by the average consumer, but I think its slightly sooner myself. As prices fall and capacities rise, laptops will start to come standard with a “ssd inside” (as a selling point no doubt. Remember the “Intel Inside” stickers plastered all over the new computers anyone? Now watch for “SSD Inside” lol) and once the joe average consumer asks “why is my laptop so much faster than my desktop with same or less hardware specs?” he or she is going to also want ssd in his/hers desktop computer as well.
I hope one thing we can both agree on is how important it is to finally be moving away from the aging and physically limited mechanical drive. Hard Drive manufacturers have all stated in some fashion or another, the mechanical drive has been pushed to its possible limits. There is nothing more we can do with it except continue to try and increase capacity. Flash on the other hand is increasing capacity simply by decreasing to sub-50nm processes, and this is happening as we speak. Capacities for NAND can double over night just by a simple decrease in die size by say 50%. I’m not sure what the limit is to our abilities to decrease nm size and or by what scales, but I’m told we have a long long long way to go before we even start to see any limits.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
i run sas atm…i’m buying these. not going for the scary fud from the lost in mechano land/old is better/have to defrag/gang. SkOrPn, you are a wordy mofo :p
December 19th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Hey m.oreilly hows it go there man? long long time no see… Yeah I guess I do get around kinda. Must have about 100k posts on the internet by now hehe. Wish there was software to keep track of it all, lol…
Now that you mention it, I was just looking at some 15k sas drives to replace my VR’s but I think Im just a tad to close to solid state to purchase yet more platters. Besides I have enough platters in my closets now after 20+ years of collecting that I think its time to try something new.
Anyone seen the new OCZ Throttles? I’m curious to see how fast it would be to install Vista or 7 onto these OCZ Vertex’s from that throttle drive. I’m guessing 3 minute or less for a clean full installation. I can’t wait to find out
. Now to find these in the wild and talk someone into testing them for me… Or talk OCZ into sending me a few out of the kindness of their heart.
Don’t be a stranger hope to see ya around the net someday.
December 20th, 2008 at 7:00 am
hey buddy
i’m with you, time for a change. i almost picked some core v2′s, though while looking for bargains, i stumbled on this page. these look to be the drive, spec to price. super talent are also putting out a very similar product, to be available around the time these hit the shelves. i’m stoked. best to you and yours.
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