The Vertex 460 marks a new chapter in the history of OCZ. Meanwhile Toshiba has bought OCZ and the company now operates under the name OCZ Storage Solutions as a subsidiary of Toshiba. When it comes to the Vertex 460, we have basically a Vertex 450 lying in front of us with the latest NAND flash memory from Toshiba. Other than that the firmware needed to be upgraded an optimized in order to sequeeze maximum performance out of the drive.
Specifications / Delivery
| Model |
OCZ Vertex 460 120 Gigabyte |
OCZ Vertex 460 240 Gigabyte |
OCZ Vertex 460 480 Gigabyte |
| Capacity |
120 Gigabyte |
240 Gigabyte |
480 Gigabyte |
| Form
Factor |
2.5'', 7mm |
2.5'', 7mm |
2.5'', 7mm |
| Memory |
19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles |
19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles |
19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, 3'000 P/E-cycles |
| Technology |
|
|
|
| Throughput |
530 MB/s sequential read
420 MB/s sequential write
80'000 IOPS 4K random read
90'000 IOPS 4K random write |
540 MB/s sequential read
525 MB/s sequential write
85'000 IOPS 4K random read
90'000 IOPS 4K random write |
545 MB/s sequential read
525 MB/s sequential write
95'000 IOPS 4K random read
90'000 IOPS 4K random write |
| Accesstime (read) |
< 0.1 ms |
< 0.1 ms |
< 0.1 ms |
| MTBF |
2'000'000
hours |
2'000'000
hours |
2'000'000
hours |
| Acoustics |
no noise |
no noise |
no noise |
| Warranty |
3 Years |
3 Years |
3 Years |
| Software |
Acronis True Image |
Acronis True Image |
Acronis True Image |
| MSRP |
89.99 Euro |
169.99 Euro |
329.99 Euro |
With the entire supply chain backing
them up, it can now be expected from OCZ that the Vertex 460 is not only
a very quick drive but also features an aggressive price tag. A closer look at
the controller reveals that there is the same Barefoot 3 M10, which could
be found with the Vertex 450 as well. Apparently, OCZ is now using the latest
Toshiba NAND and there were some changes to the firmware necessary in order to keep
performance and endurance as high as possible.
With the Vertex 460 you get OCZ's latest Barefoot 3 M10
controller which the company developed in-house. According to the block diagram we
can see that the controller is based on an ARM architecture. Additionally OCZ
optimized the clock generator towards lower power consumption, which they
already did when they released the Vertex 450. In other words
this means, they've lowered the internal clock speeds in order to make the drive
more energy efficient. Furthermore this drive ships with AES 256-bit encryption
as well as an ECC engine which is taking care of error corrections. On the right
hand side of the diagram you can see that OCZ equips the Vertex 460 with an
additional DRAM cache, which in the end helps to improve performance. When it
comes to the NAND interface, OCZ uses an eight channel ONFI/Toggle interface.
The Vertex 460 SSD features NAND flash, which has been
manufactured using 19 nanometer manufacturin process. When it comes
to the manufacturing process of NAND flash, then a customer gets an upside as
well as a downside at the same time. Let's talk about the upside first: a
manufacturing process shrink
enables the manufacturer to put more memory chips on one 300 millimeter wafer.
In other words the manufacturing process becomes more cost efficient. This cost
efficiency is going to be carried to the end user who actually buys these
products for a lower price. The downside however is, that making the structures
smaller causes the P/E-cycles to drop. Most 25 nanometer MLC NAND flash chips
featured a P/E-cycle count of either 5'000 or 3'000. Toshibas XYZ 19
nanometer chips - the ones you find on the Vertex 460 - are validated at 3'000
P/E-cycles.
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