With their Vector series solid state disks OCZ has some very solid and well performing drives in their line-up. Today the US maker of SSDs launches the successor, which goes by the name Vector 150. Ahead of the actualy launch we received a Vector 150 with 240 Gigabyte for testing and we're quite curious what it is that the Americans were actually able to improve, on the already good, Vector drive.


Article in English

Artikel in Deutsch

Article en français

Articolo in Italiano

Specifications / Delivery

Model	Vector 150 120 Gigabyte	Vector 150 240 Gigabyte	Vector 150 480 Gigabyte
Capacity	120 GB	240 GB	480 GB
Form Factor	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm
Memory	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~3'000 P/E-cycles	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~3'000 P/E-cycles	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~3'000 P/E-cycles
Endurance	5 years @ 50 GB/day	5 years @ 50 GB/day	5 years @ 50 GB/day
Controller	Indilinx Barefoot 3	Indilinx Barefoot 3	Indilinx Barefoot 3
Model	Toshiba bla bla 19nm	Toshiba bla bla 19nm	Toshiba bla bla 19nm
Throughput	550 MB/s sequential read 450 MB/s sequential write 80'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 100'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise	no noise	no noise
Warranty	5 Years	5 Years	5 Years
Price	129.99 USD	239.99 USD	499.99 USD

It has been almost exactly one year, that OCZ released their first Vector SSD series. In our review on the first Vector we mentioned that it is a solid drive, which performed very good and it's even able to keep with todays fastest drives. So, what could have possibly been improved with the new Vector 150?

First of all we want to have a look at what stayed the same. Apparently the Indilinx IDX500M00-BC controller, which OCZ was using in the original Vector is a really good controller, since the new Vector 150 uses the same chip. Nevertheless there is one thing about the Vector 150 line-up which we think is worth mentioning. Since OCZ is proud of being at the forefront of SSD development we would have expected that there was a 960 Gigabyte Version of this drive, but so far the largest drive is a 480 Gigabyte model.

Now to the improvements: one upgrade concerns the NAND chips. OCZ decided to equip the Vector 150 with 19 nanometre Toogle NAND from Toshiba, which offers 3'000 P/E cycles, which is basically a very reasonable value. Other than that OCZ is using almost nine percent of the drives capacity for overprovisioning purposes. Overprovisioning is helping with endurance, sustained performance as well as keeping the warranty high. Especially when it comes to endurance OCZ offers quite an improvement over the first Vector drive. With the Vector 150, OCZ now advertises that the drive can withstand 50 Gigabyte write per day over a five year period, which is 150 percent more than what the original Vector had to offer (20 Gigabyte per day for five years). This 150 percent improvement is what influenced the name of the Vector 150, which means, that OCZ must be rather proud of this level of endurance.

Included in delivery there is a copy of Acronis True Image as well as a 3.5 inch adapter. Meanwhile we would love to see two versions of SSDs hitting retail: one that comes with and another that ships without bundle, whereas the bulk version should be a bit cheaper. There are quite a few users out there in the wild, that already own an SSD and they want to upgrade, meaning they won't really need the accessories, since they might have bought them with their first SSD already.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Random write KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 10 - Conclusion