OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Review

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

As with the G. Skill Falcon, as long as you occasionally run the wiper.exe program the Vertex will not stutter. You can however overload the drive, but just like a regular spindle based drive your system just becomes slooooow and does not stutter per say. Of course, if you pile on enough past this point it will then get the hiccups but this is way, way past the point where even an HDD would start to complain. In a nut shell you really don’t need to do any OS tweaking to get phenomenal performance from this drive; nor worry about the dreaded stutter issue as it’s not there in any perceptible way. We of course recommend turning of defrag and the ilk but that is just common sense “care and handling” of any SSSD more than tweaking for acceptable user experience. If you do go whole hog and either use MFT (or just use diskpar to properly align the partition) you will be rewarded with increased performance; but after a certain point “faster” becomes less and less discernible and the time (and possible monetary investment) required to do such tweaks does quickly hit the point of diminishing returns.

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of their initial review.


IF there is a weakness to the Vertex it has to be the elevated cost of it versus the G.Skill Falcon. Of course, we have seen Mail In Rebates (MIR) recently on the Vertex line which do address this perceived weakness so we recommend snapping it up as soon as you see it on sale. In the mean time, if you eliminate the Falcon from the equation the Vertex does become a very, very good way to get X-25M levels of speed (and better) and increased storage capacity, so it is hard to knock the Vertex as being a bad value. OCZ were the ones who brought the Indilinx to market and were the ones who took the risk on an unknown company. Should we reward this? Yes….especially if you can find a good M.I.R. for this drive.