OCZ Vertex 3 Pro SSD – New Lightweight Champion of the World! James White February 18, 2011 Solid state storage is still one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of modern technology, a fact reinforced by the OCZ’s Vertex 3 Pro drive. OCZ has been among the front runnings in SSD tech and it is no stranger to providing us with some of the fastest drives on the market. The new Vertex 3 Pro boasts an insane 550MBps maximum read and 500MBps maximum write speed, mostly thanks to the brand spanking new SandForce SF-2500 controller. It’s been put through the benchmarking wringer by a number of sites and the results are in: the Vertex 3 Pro is the new title holder among standalone 2.5-inch SSDs. AnandTech goes so far as to say it’s “the first drive that really needs a 6Gbps interface.” I guess this will be the first drive to provide the proof that the move from SATA Revision 2.0 (SATA 3 Gbits/s) to SATA Revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbits/s) is warranted. The V3Pro isn’t yet on sale and the hardware looked at it in these previews was not final, but the next generation of SSDs looks to be keeping the breakneck pace of development that has characterized the storage medium. They may not get cheaper during the immediate future, but they seem to be bent increasing the gap in speed between them and HDD to ludicrous levels. At this rate, we may need a SATA 4.0 revision soon. Speed is not all you get from the new SandForce SF-2500. It seems they have also added some revisions to how TRIM is handled on this drive to prevent drive performance lose over time. This is an issue that affects all SSDs… well maybe all SSDs that don’t have the new SandForce SF-2500. These changes lead to this drive’s worst case scenario speeds that would still make most HDD sequential read/write look slow. For details about these revisions and what it means to your as the end user, check AnandTech’s post for more details from someone with first hand experience and knowledge. Source: Engadget and AnandTech Share This With The World!
