The new Vertex 4 SSDs from OCZ incorporate the Indilinx Everest 2 controller, unlike the second and third iterations from the past; the new controller comes with features like Auto-Encryption, AES-256 support, Ndurance 2.0 Technology for reduced write amplification, adaptive NAND management or Multi-Level ECC. The controller also supports Redundant NAND Array technology.

Vertex 4 does no longer suffer of any compression-related limitations and was built to produce higher IOps (Vertex 3 was rated at 60K 4K IOps and Vertex 4 at 85K 4K IOps). At the same time, the Vertex 3 was advertised with a 550MB/s transfer rate and the Vertex 4 a little lower, at 535MB/s.

While we can see that in tests which use uncompressed data the Sandforce-based SSDs lead without issues, when we ran more recent benchmarks which use compressed data, the Vertex 4 succeeded to exceed the performances of the Vertex 3 240GB, mostly in the write department. We must also keep in mind that the drive performances are also influenced by the total volume capacity, the 512GB version being the fastest of the bunch, but also the most expensive.

OCZ have optimized the firmware for the Vertex 4, so the SSD behaves differently depending on how much space is filled on the drive. If the drive is half-full, we will enjoy optimized performance and after crossing more than half full, the garbage collection algorithm will re-optimize the drive for maximum efficiency based on a larger data footprint.

The 128GB version of the Vertex 4 can be found for about 97 Euros at online stores, while the Sandforce-based Vertex 3 is available for 101 Euros.

OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA III SSD Recommended For:

I would like to thank again to OCZ for making this review possible!