OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD Review

OCZ Vertex 3 120GB – Internals

As usual, four screws hold the backplate in place which protects the innards of the drive. The PCB is held with four screws as well to hold it securely in place.

On the backside, there are eight NAND flash modules situated on one end of the board.

The multi-level cell (MLC) NAND is of Intel manufacture and each are 8 GB in density. They are also 25nm in architecture with 16 total chips on board giving a total of 128 GB. A differentiation between the 120 GB drive and the 240 GB drive is the number of channels per die with the former have one and the latter doubling up which has an impact on performance as we’ll see.

On the flip side, we find the other eight NAND modules along with the controller. Also, you can see the PCB is OCZ branded as they do their own drive fabrication which helps them maintain an extra measure of control over quality.

As we saw with our look at the beta Vertex 3 240 GB and Vertex 3 Pro drives, the SandForce SF-2281 controller is the force (pun intended) behind the Vertex 3 120GB SSD. Employing its proprietary DuraClass technology for all wear-leveling, error correction and a host of other tasks. Something we always mention is that the SandForce controllers all rely on real-time data compression to reach peak performance so any activity on incompressible data will hinder performance.