OCZ Vertex 460 240GB SSD Review

By Joe Evans

Vertex 460 Internals

A simple trashing of the warranty void sticker and four screw removals and we were inside the Vertex 460.

Vertex 460

The image looks virtually the same as we saw with the Vertex 450 including the thermal pad on the controller. As well it should. It’s essentially the same save for the smaller architecture NAND which isn’t exactly visible to the naked eye.

Vertex 460 PCB

The first side of the PCB carries half of the NAND packages and one of the cache chips.

Vertex 460 nand

The 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND carries the part number TH58TEG7DDJBA4C and is a change from the Vertex 450 which carried Micron NAND. Obviously, this is the result of the acquisition by Toshiba and frankly the one piece of the pie that OCZ was missing – in house NAND manufacture.

Vertex 460 PCB

Flipping the board over, we see the remaining NAND, the second cache chip and the controller.

Vertex 460 cache

The Micron DDR3-1333 SDRAM cache chips carry FBGA# D9LGK and are each 256MB in capacity giving this 240GB drive 512MB of cache which is the same as on the previous generation 450 drive.

Vertex 460 M10

The Barefoot 3 M10 Indilinx controller with part number IDX500M10-BC which is difficult to make out due to the degradation of the ink on the chip from the thermal pad. This is a 100% OCZ designed controller which as a bit slower than the M00 version found on the Vector drive. It would appear that the firmware has been tweaked to play nice with the 19nm NAND and to offer a bit better performance but on the whole, not much has changed. This Indilinx controller offers greater consistency of performance when presented with variable data types as opposed to what we see with others that leverage compression technology to get optimal performance. As usual, the controller does all the heavy lifting on wear-leveling and error correction activities and now that this has been in consumers hands for awhile, appears to be a very stable and reliable controller.