OCZ Technology are back with a new addition to the Vertex family and armed with Indilinx Barefoot 3, Vertex 450 hopes to dominate the SSD market.
Product on Review: Vertex 450
Manufacturer & Sponsor: OCZ Technology
Street Price: £188.99inc. VAT (GBP)
Having acquired Indilinx back in 2011 OCZ have since been utilising the Indilinx Barefoot controller in its first step away from the notorious SandForce controller. We first saw OCZ use Barefoot in the Vector SSD but now they are back with another drive and a slightly revised controller. Can the more affordable Vertex 450 prove its worth in the highly competitive SSD storage sector?
At the heart of Vertex 450 is Indilinx Barefoot 3. Furthermore, this new drive uses 20nm MLC NAND flash in a bid to deliver fast response and reliability. The Vertex family has claimed many an accolade, can the 450 continue this trend?
OCZ Technology’s take on Vertex 450
Get to know next-generation storage at its finest. Using the latest 20nm NAND flash process, OCZ Vertex 450 SSDs deliver performance and reliability designed to empower your laptop or desktop to be faster and more responsive. Engineered by longtime SSD experts, the OCZ Vertex 450 Series delivers the performance, productivity, and energy efficiency missing from your current system. Clear your life of computer lag, and get a computing experience worthy of your time.
Technical Specifications
PHYSICAL
Usable Capacities (IDEMA)
128GB, 256GB, 512GB
NAND Components
20nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash
NAND Controller
Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10
Interface
SATA 3 6Gb/s (Backwards compatible with SATA II 3Gb/s)
Form Factor
2.5-inch, ultra-slim 7mm
Dimension (L x W x H)
99.7 x 69.75 x 7mm
Weight
115g
Power Consumption
Idle: 0.55W, Active: 2.15W 128GB
Idle: 0.60W, Active: 2.65W 256GB-512GB
Operating Temperature 0°C ~ 55°C
Storage Temperature -45°C ~ 85°C
Shock Resistance 1500G/0.5ms
Certifications RoHS, CE, FCC, KCC, C-Tick, BSMI, VCCI, UL
Usable Capacities (IDEMA)
128GB, 256GB, 512GB
NAND Components
20nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash
NAND Controller
Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10
Interface
SATA 3 6Gb/s (Backwards compatible with SATA II 3Gb/s)
Form Factor
2.5-inch, ultra-slim 7mm
Dimension (L x W x H)
99.7 x 69.75 x 7mm
Weight
115g
Power Consumption
Idle: 0.55W, Active: 2.15W 128GB
Idle: 0.60W, Active: 2.65W 256GB-512GB
Operating Temperature 0°C ~ 55°C
Storage Temperature -45°C ~ 85°C
Shock Resistance 1500G/0.5ms
Certifications RoHS, CE, FCC, KCC, C-Tick, BSMI, VCCI, UL
Packaging & Closer Look
Vertex 450 arrives in a professionally designed packet. The front details such attributes as the size, capacity and fundamental features. On the reverse, there is just a short section describing some of the features.
The packaging Vertex 450
Within the packaging there is another packet with a folding cover. Inside, are a number of items including the SSD itself, within an anti-static bag which is cushioned with a foam surround. Included are: 3.5” adapter plate, mounting screws, sticker and warranty leaflet.
Included items within the bundle
The Vertex 450 SSD is very appealing to the eye. Although an SSD is a fairly mundane product from a visual standpoint OCZ have done a great job in making Vertex 450 as attractive as possible. The “Indilinx Infused” badge can be clearly seen since Vertex 450 uses Indilinx Barefoot 3 as its controller.
The front or topside of Vertex 450
Flipping the drive over we can see that the rear has a specifications label which details such things as the capacity, serial number and part number. The specifications label also has a QR code which takes you directly to the product page for Vertex 450.
The back of Vertex 450
To remove the cover (do so at your own risk – also voids warranty) – four screws need to be removed. Upon removing the cover we can delve into the inner-workings of Vertex 450.
Vertex 450 takes advantage of MLC Synchronous NAND with a total of sixteen NAND Flash chips, eight on the front side, and eight on the reverse. This MLC NAND uses 20nm architecture. At the heart of this drive is Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller – when you take the cover off the drive a thermal pad sits cover the controller to provide heat dissipation. Another noteworthy inclusion is the 512MB of cache.
Vertex 450’s PCB
Test Setup & Methodology
Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed. Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:
Benchmarks
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
Iometer
SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
Windows 7 Boot Time Test
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
Iometer
SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
Windows 7 Boot Time Test
Test system
CPU Intel Core-i7 4770K
Motherboard GIGABYTE Z87X-OC
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro (2400MHz) CL10
HDD
– OCZ Vertex 450 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 EVO 750GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 Pro 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Toshiba 256GB THNSNH256GCST (Sata 6Gbps)
– OCZ Vector 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Corsair Force GS 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Kingston HyperX 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– ADATA S510 120GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Intel 520 480GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 830 Series 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung HD103SJ 1TB (Sata 3Gbps)
PSU Corsair HX1050 Gold
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
Motherboard GIGABYTE Z87X-OC
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro (2400MHz) CL10
HDD
– OCZ Vertex 450 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 EVO 750GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 Pro 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 840 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Toshiba 256GB THNSNH256GCST (Sata 6Gbps)
– OCZ Vector 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Corsair Force GS 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Kingston HyperX 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– ADATA S510 120GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Intel 520 480GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung 830 Series 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Samsung HD103SJ 1TB (Sata 3Gbps)
PSU Corsair HX1050 Gold
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
Benchmarks: ATTO
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Benchmarks: AS SSD
AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software that analyses different types of hard drive. Giving sequential benchmark write and read statistics in MB/s. A simple program that is very useful.
Benchmarks: Iometer
Iometer is based on a client–server model, where one instance of the Iometer graphical user interface is managing multiple ‘workers’ (each one representing a separate Dynamo.exe process) which are doing the I/O. Iometer performs Asynchronous I/O – accessing files or block devices (later one allowing to bypass the file system buffers).
Iometer allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file.
Iometer allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file.
For the purpose of this test. The 4K 50%/50% read/write file will be under the examination with 100% Random Distribution – reporting back on IOPS and MBs per Second.
Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.
Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.
It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.
Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.
It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.
Benchmarks: Windows 7 Boot
Synthetic testing is valuable in the examination of Solid State Drives. But some of the tests may not mean all that much to some readers so the final test in this review is a real world test showing the Windows 7 boot time.
In order to perform this test (and indeed all other benchmarks), a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional was installed on the Vertex 450 – the image of this install with no additional applications or drivers was exported for importing onto each drive at the time of testing. This will provide a clean and fair environment for comparing the boot times on each of the drives. The times were monitored using a stopwatch.
In order to perform this test (and indeed all other benchmarks), a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional was installed on the Vertex 450 – the image of this install with no additional applications or drivers was exported for importing onto each drive at the time of testing. This will provide a clean and fair environment for comparing the boot times on each of the drives. The times were monitored using a stopwatch.
Conclusion
OCZ have remained a popular choice for storage products for many years and to that end they have claimed many an accolade.
Having moved away from SandForce OCZ are now utilising Indilinx with the latest Vertex 450. They acquired this company back in 2011 and it makes total sense for them to develop and take advantage of in-house technology. Not only does it allow them to bring the costs down but it also removes third party incompatibilities that occur.
Today we have been looking at OCZ’s latest creation by way of the Vertex 450 256GB model. In our performance benchmark tests this drive demonstrated prowess in a variety of different environments and scenarios. We found Vertex 450 a great performing drive.
Being priced at £188.99 this 256GB edition of the Vertex 450 is decent value for money although there are a number of similar spec drives for lower costs including the recently reviewed Samsung 840 EVO.
Vertex 450 is OCZ’s second attempt using an Indilinx controller and it has successfully proven its worth with this new drive. OCZ will need to keep an eye on pricing though, if they want to steal attention from cheaper counter-parts.
Pros
+ Good sequential read/write results
+ 3 years warranty
+ Affordable
Cons
– Fell behind in Iometer benchmarks
+ Good sequential read/write results
+ 3 years warranty
+ Affordable
Cons
– Fell behind in Iometer benchmarks
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.
