[Brian]

Well, it's on now - SandForce has announced their new client SSD processor and OCZ is the first to jump - with their new Vertex 3 SSD. While the SF-2281 is the centerpiece, delivering quoted sequential speeds of up to 550MB/s read and 525MB/s writes, the updated SATA 6Gb/s interface deserves credit too. By comparison to the Vertex 2, those top line read and write speeds are about 90% faster with the Vertex 3. The spec sheet makes it sound fast, but is it the fastest SSD to be seen by our test bench?

Full Review

[sblantipodi]

Brian, on 24 February 2011 - 09:20 AM, said:

Well, it's on now - SandForce has announced their new client SSD processor and OCZ is the first to jump - with their new Vertex 3 SSD. While the SF-2281 is the centerpiece, delivering quoted sequential speeds of up to 550MB/s read and 525MB/s writes, the updated SATA 6Gb/s interface deserves credit too. By comparison to the Vertex 2, those top line read and write speeds are about 90% faster with the Vertex 3. The spec sheet makes it sound fast, but is it the fastest SSD to be seen by our test bench?

Full Review

Thanks for the great review.

This disk is ok but sincerely I would prefer more gigs per money and more reliability before performance.
240GB for 250$ should be the next frontier before thinking to increasing performance, I think.

[TSullivan]

Small baby steps

It will be interesting to see how the next-gen drives get priced as we see more models hit the market. I see a price war brewing if nothing else before summer.

[Brian]

I'm not sure there's anything to complain about in terms of reliability, at least we can't complain yet. I think those issues while not a thing of the past, are certainly diminishing generation over generation.

[Djembe]

Where did you find the TBW value?

[TSullivan]

Djembe, on 24 February 2011 - 07:03 PM, said:

Where did you find the TBW value?

It was the number OCZ gave us which kind of follows what SandForce says when you look at the write amp spec of that.

[ctbear]

Awesome review. Question...I remember reading somewhere that non-sandy bridge mobos with 6Gb/s SATA interfaces may not perform on par and will actually bottle neck speeds due to its sharing of bandwidth with PCI-E pipes? I have an Asus P6X58D-E mobo with 2 x SATA 6Gb/s, and I'm wondering if this issue exists on my platform that would prevent me from using a drive such as the Vertex 3 at its maximum potential. I believe it uses a Marvell controller (6GB/s), which can only achieve about 300mb/s writes, and 80mb/s reads in raid 0 with higher latency. Some have even gone as far as using the native SataIII port without using the Marvell Driver due to TRIM not working with Marvell drivers. What options do I have?

[TSullivan]

Well it all depends on the controller and bandwidth of said controller. This is what OCZ said to us when we were discussing testbench hardware specifics:

"Controllers like the Marvell (PCIe G2 X1) on the X58 create a bottleneck and don't show the full potential of the drive."

Outside of that I don't know what sort of drops you will see. If you are only getting 80MBs writes though... that is worse than Intel 3.0Gbps SATA.

So chances are if you use it with that board, it might not be as fast. Since this drive's speed can vary pretty significantly depending on the platform being tested, we are actually going to be updating our review soon with scores from a non-RAID LSI 9211 in place of the MegaRAID 9260, and eventually our Intel SandyBridge platform.In terms of options, getting a quality RAID card will significantly boost performance, even in single drive mode.

[dvlhntr]

is this drive crash safe or does it like other SSDs to this point need a capacitor to be considered crash safe ?

I understand that with a SATA connector its not competing in the SAS space so that may play a factor.

[Brian]

Are you asking if it's using a super-cap? It's not, that's strictly an enterprise drive feature.