While OCZ has always been known as a premium memory brand, long the bastion of enthusiasts and performance junkies, they've really made a name for themselves in the past year or so with the introduction of several lines of solid state drives. Some of them are geared for affordability, some of them are tweaked for performance. The Vertex Turbo, as its name implies, is definitely one of the latter. Read on for our full review.
Specifications:
* Capacity: 120GB (also available in 30GB, 60GB and 250GB sizes)
* Cache: 64MB running at 180MHz
* Host interface: SATA (3Gbps)
* Acoustics: 0dB
* Power consumption: 2 watts when in use, 0.5 watts when resting in standby
* Size: 3.93 x 2.74 x 0.366 inches
* Warranty: 3-year manufacturer's warranty
The pricing of the drive depends, naturally, on its quantity. The manufacturer's suggested retail prices are as follows:
Vertex Turbo 30: $139.99
Vertex Turbo 60: $249.99
Vertex Turbo 120: $409.00
Vertex Turbo 250: $774.99
Build and Design
It's hard to talk too much about the physical/visual build and design characteristics of a hard drive -- even an SSD -- but there are a few things worth mentioning. First and foremost, the Vertex Turbo, like its slightly slower Vertex cousin, feels very much like a premium product. The finish is better than the original, with a shiny, slightly raised effect to the metal.
The only real issue I can take with the construction of the drive is its size. In a desktop, that's obviously not going to be a problem; in fact, you can fit several of these solid state drives in the room taken up by just a couple of 3.5-inch desktop drives. Laptops, however, can pose something of a problem. I tried this drive in a laptop and netbook, and it didn't fit great in either one. Both times I had to take the drive tray out and fiddle with it to get it to fit. In the case of the netbook, that meant that the only thing keep it plugged in beneath the access panel was just the tension of the SATA connector. Unfortunately, that's not too tight, and I ended up having to buy a screwdriver on a recent business trip to fix the problem, stuffing a taxi receipt into the drive bay to keep the drive from unplugging internally.
One of the ways that OCZ has managed to keep the price down while providing a drive with reasonable capacity is to use MLC, or multi level cell, instead of SLC, or single level cell technology. You can read a light overview of the difference between the technologies in our review of the original OCZ Vertex. Suffice it to say, MLC has a reputation for being cheaper than the alternative, but also for being slower and shorter lived. Really, this technology no longer deserves any of those holdovers.
Performance
OCZ has put a lot of work into making MLC SSDs shine, and drives like the Vertex Turbo show it. While the Turbo branding shares most of the same fundamentals as the earlier Vertex (sans Turbo) drives do, they've been tweaked to get as much performance out of the hardware as possible. The cache is still set at 64MB, but its been clocked higher: from 166MHz to 180MHz. They use a custom tweaked firmware, too; the Vertex Turbo drives are still at firmware version 1.00 and cannot trade firmwares designed for use with the original Vertex drives.
It uses the same flash memory and the ARM-based Indilinx Barefoot controller as the original Vertex as well. That Indilinx controller has really made waves in the tech press these past few months. Originally, low-cost SSDs used the now-infamous jMicron controller and it couldn't keep up - legions of users experienced stuttering and freezing as a result. Affordable SSDs were given a bad name.
The Vertex drives put that issue to rest. Now the Vertex Turbo drives are trying to show that even high performance drives can be affordable. Well, affordable for a solid state drive, anyway. The biggest competition facing OCZ in the high performance arena is easily the Intel MLC solid state drives, and even against such strong performers as that, the Vertex Turbos are easily able to hold their own.
Our original review said the following: "The drive is fast. Very fast. It's faster than any traditional rotating magnetic hard drive." The Vertex Turbo is even faster. It's not a huge jump, but the benchmarks definitely show it. Depending on the exercise, the tests were usually between five and twenty percent faster on the Vertex Turbo as opposed to the original Vertex. It's debatable just how important that is, though.
Conclusion
OCZ really hit it out of the park the first time around, with the Vertex series of SSDs. The Vertex Turbo might not be the grand slam home run of the first, but it's certainly a score in its own right. The new drives are faster than ever and are able to compete with Intel's own brand, likely the leader in terms of mindshare regardless of units sold. One of the biggest and almost only problems we had with the original Vertex series is the convoluted series of hoops users had to jump through in order to accomplish something so mundane as updating the drive's firmware. Fortunately that's all been fixed since then, and while there's yet to be a new firmware revision released for the Vertex Turbo series of drives, buyers won't have to dig through their closets and find a jumper to just to enable the firmware update mode.
The drive is also a little pricey. Our review unit is currently attracting prices over five hundred dollars due to general scarcity. Is it worth paying that much? I can't answer that; enthusiasts have always paid extra for performance at almost any cost. The thirty gigabyte option, going for close to $150 currently, is a great option if you can deal with the reduced storage space. If you already have a Vertex SSD, it's not worth the upgrade costs. If you have an older hard drive though, and are looking to take your system's responsiveness to a whole new level, look no further than these guys. Older systems become unimaginably snappy, and fast, modern systems? They get taken to a new level entirely.
Pros
* Fast
* No really, fast
* Silent
* Cool
Cons
* Pricey
* Won't fit in all laptops
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