Legit Storage Reviews
OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB SandForce SF-1500 SSD Preview
| Manufacturer: | OCZ Technology |
| Product: | Vertex 2 Pro |
| Date: | Wed, Feb 17, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Inside the Vertex 2 Pro SSD
Since we have never seen what components are being used inside the second generation OCZ Vertex SSD series we opened up our 100GB Vertex 2 Pro drive to see what the internals look like.
After removing the four small Philips head screws that hold down the Vertex 2 Pro Series cover we were able to lift off the cover and
see what makes this little SSD tick.
Here is a closer look at the main component side of the PCB where you can make out eight MLC NAND Flash memory chips and the highly anticipated SandForce 1500 controller that is being used on the Vertex 2 Pro and Vertex 2 Limited Edition SSDs. The regular Vertex 2 SSDs will be using the SandForce 1200 controller, which has a build cost that will be $100 cheaper. The SandForce SF-1500 model controller is not cheap, so that means this 100GB drive could cost upwards of $600. That is a significant amount of money for a drive that once formatted will only have 93.1GB of usable space!
Flipping the PCB over we can take a look at the other side, which is bare and has just eight more micron MLC NAND memory chips on it. The location of the large 'super capacitor' is present, but you will notice that the Cap-XX is missing in action. We asked OCZ what happened to it and were told the following:
"This will NOT be present on the consumer class devices Vertex2, and Vertex2 Pro. This will only be on our enterprise class Deneva product line. Basically what it's for is in event of a sudden power loss the drive will go into a mode where it will focus on completing write commands using the power in the super cap. Its only enough for a short burst, but it's enough to get the job done. This is important on SSDs more so than HDDs in enterprise. On an HDD when write caching is turned off, the last write command is lost, but the rest of your data is secure. On standard SSDs because of the nature of Flash and Flash management it is not typically possible to guarantee data integrity on sudden power loss. The enterprise class Deneva Series will be the first high performance readily available SSD that guarantees data integrity on sudden power loss. As a bonus effect the last write does in fact complete so no data is lost..." OCZ PR
The heart and soul the Vertex 2 Pro is the SF-1500 controller seen above. As we noted, the Vertex 2 Pro doesn't have any cache chips on it as that is because the SandForce controller itself is said to carry a small cache inside that is a number of megabytes in size. Inside the controller there's also the Tensilica DC_570T CPU core; this is used in both the SF-1200 and SF-1500 models. This controller includes support for all the latest features like native TRIM support. OCZ claims maximum read/write performance of 280/270 MB/s, which translates to 12% greater read performance than the original Vertex drive, while the write performance is claimed to be an incredible 56% faster.
The OCZ Vertex 2 Pro features Micron 29F64G08CFABA MLC flash memory. In total there are 16 chips and each IC is 8GB in density.
Next Page - The OCZ Toolbox Utility
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - Is SandForce The Best SSD Controller?
Page 2 - Why The SandForce Controller Is Special Page 3 - Inside the Vertex 2 Pro SSD Page 4 - The OCZ Toolbox Utility Page 5 - The Test System Page 6 - HD Tach v3.0.4.0 Page 7 - HD Tune v4.01 Page 8 - HD Tune v4.01 - Random Access Page 9 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Page 10 - CrystalDiskMark v3.0 Page 11 - ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41 Page 12 - PCMark Vantage Page 13 - IOMeter Page 14 - AS SSD Benchmark Page 15 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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