OCZ’s latest Solid State Drive is called Vertex and is a bit different from the older drives. The difference is that Vertex uses a new memory controller from Korean manufacturer Indilinx. The new memory controller is called Barefoot and has been optimized for regular PC use and sport 64MB RAM buffer. OCZ hasn’t just optimized the performance specifications of the new drives but the new drive has also managed to pass bar in real life benchmarks.
At Anandtech they have tested Vertex in multiple sessions and after a great review of the drive and the SSD technology in general it has now published an update with a new firmware from Indilinx and OCZ that improves performance up to three fold in some benchmarks.
Vertex has also appeared on video at Madshrimps where they took two identical notebooks and equipped them with a regular 7200 RPM HDD and 2.5″ Vertex SSD respectively. They taped several of the benchmarks that shows how a Dell D630 boots Windows 7 and some programs in 39 seconds with the Vertex drive while the same task took more than 2 minutes with a computer using a regular 2.5″ 7200 RPM harddrive. There are several videos to watch over at Madshrimps.
If one Vertex drive isn’t fast enough you can connect two or more in a RAID array. That is exactly what Benchmark Reviews did where they took two 30GB Vertex SSD to achieve really impressive numbers. Even if Vertex costs less than Intel’s X25-M SSD it is still far from cheap with a real Vertex RAID array. More on Vertex in RAID-0 at Benchmark Reviews.
