Legit Storage Reviews
OCZ Vertex LE (Limited Edition) 100GB SSD Review
| Manufacturer: | OCZ Technology |
| Product: | OCZSSD2-1VTXLE100G |
| Date: | Sat, Feb 20, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Free Capacity and Final Thoughts
Capacity
When it comes to storage capacity, the OCZ Vertex LE 100GB SSD has a free capacity of 93.1GB as shown above. The drive has 128GB of MLC Flash memory on the PCB, so about 27% of the drives capacity is reserved for the Sandforce DuraWare wear-leveling technology.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The OCZ Vertex LE is one of the fastest SSDS that we have ever seen here at Legit Reviews. It was able to give the Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD and Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB drives a run for their money in many of the benchmarks. We were able to reach read speeds of up to 290MB/sec. and write speeds of up to 240MB/sec in ATTO on the Vertex LE and that was impressive. We were able to get much higher than the 270MB/s max read speed, but we were unable to reach the advertised max write of 250MB/s on our test system in any benchmark. The Vertex Limited Edition SSD has just 5,000 pieces available and with performance results like these they shouldn't be around for too long.
Anyone with the original Vertex series drive would find this drive to be
a great update as the Sandforce controller delivers much better
random read and write performance. Looking at just sequential read and write performance the Sandforce controller in the Vertex LE offers basically the same performance found with the Indilinix Barefoot controller in the original Vertex series of SSDs. The results in IOMeter and
CrystalDiskMark say it all and the Vertex LE appears to be a solid drive for the consumer market. Any drive that is limited by 3Gbps SATA interface is a sign of where the market is going and that is the move over to the SATA 6Gbps interface. All of the drives in this review were tested on the SATA 6Gbps interface as that is where the market is headed right now and once Intel comes out with chipset support for this feature it will really take off. AMD will be supporting SATA 6Gbps drives on their upcoming 890G chipset, so native chipset support of SATA 6Gbps storage devices isn't that far off if you are an AMD fan. Intel fans will have to wait until 2011, which is when the ICH10R successor is scheduled to arrive. It is hard to believe that we have been stuck using the ICH10R chipset since 2008!
When it comes to pricing the MSRP on the Vertex LE 100GB drive that we tested here today was $399. With a total free capacity of 93.1GB this means that you are paying $4.29 per GB of
storage space. At the $400 price point this drive is going to be competing directly with the Intel X25-M Gen 2 160GB SSD that was one of the
drives that we compared this one to. The Intel X25-M has 149GB of free space with a street price of $429.99
shipped, which comes out to be $2.89 per GB. The OCZ Vertex LE was found to be overall faster than the Intel Gen 2 drives, but the higher price tag and limited availability might keep some people away. This is the very first consumer controller series for Sandforce, so it will be interesting to see how much more performance OCZ can get from the drive in the months to come.
UPDATE: Newegg now has the 200GB version of the Vertex LE (Limited Edition) SSD for $799 with free shipping.
Legit Bottom Line: The OCZ Vertex LE 100GB hard drive is one of the fastest we have tested, but when it comes to pricing it faces tough competition with other brands!
Questions or Comments? View this thread in our forums!
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| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - OCZ Vertex LE SSD Performance Review
Page 2 - Inside the Vertex LE SSD Page 3 - The OCZ Toolbox Utility Page 4 - The Test System Page 5 - HD Tach v3.0.4.0 Page 6 - HD Tune v4.01 Page 7 - HD Tune v4.01 - Random Access Page 8 - ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41 Page 9 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Page 10 - CrystalDiskMark v3.0 Page 11 - AS SSD Benchmark Page 12 - PCMark Vantage Page 13 - IOMeter Page 14 - Free Capacity and Final Thoughts |
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