OCZ steals the performance crown with its latest SSD effort. If only it were a little easier on the wallet...
The difference between a man with an SSD and a man without is like the difference between a king and a beggar. No matter how hard you beg your mechanical harddrive to spin ever faster, you'll never be able to eke out more performance - the physical limitation is simply too great. Thankfully, the king enlisted his wizards to tackle this most important task, resulting in the gloriously speedy SSDs that we have today.
For what seems like the billionth Vertex SSD from OCZ, this 'LE' or Limited Edition drive comes with a very neat distinction that pulls it out of the crowd of Indilinx-based drives; it's powered by the Sandforce SF-1200 controller. The controller is an impressive piece of technology, with built-in wear leveling, full TRIM support and even ECC support to ensure your data is exactly as you wrote it.
It's a bloody fast performer too, with an average read speed of 223.8MB/s, random access of 0.1ms and a hefty burst speed of 246.5MB/s. While it's not the largest drive ever, coming in at only 93.16GB when formatted under NTFS, performance is the best we've seen from any SSD so far. We filled the drive with useless data until it was bursting at the seams, and noted a small though significant performance drop: a decrease of 201.5MB/s average read, slightly higher 258.1MB/s burst and slightly slower 0.2ms random access.
It's not unusual for a drive to go backwards slightly when full, and for the blistering performance on hand it's definitely a great choice for an OS drive. Just a huge shame about the price.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012