OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Review

Packaging and Accessories

Unlike the Apex SSD, this drive’s packaging is all business, and there is no “fun loving” orange or other “interesting” colours to be found on this wee beastie. The Vertex comes in a black and white colour scheme which for good long time have been the colours of enthusiast grade drives. If this colour scheme is not to your liking you really have to go and argue it with Western Digital who cemented BLACK = enthusiast/power drives, and we think it is good that OCZ followed suite. Water is wet, the sky is blue and arse kicking fast drives are black editions…why try to remake and rebrand what has worked very well for others in the past?


In this day and age you can’t just have the best of the best, people NEED to know that you are the best and immediately think of YOUR product IP when they think “fast SSD”. We all know this is going to be a very good drive but if you are not “in the know” you just need to look at this box and it will hit you at the visceral level, even when compared to other similarly spec’ed drives from the competition. To us this instant recognition does set the Vertex apart from a market which may just start to get crowded. Product branding is one area where OCZ dominates the market (even when compared to Intel) and you have to give those OCZ marketing masters a nod of respect for knocking another one out of the park.


After admiring the good looks of the box and checking to see that yes its not just a pretty face but does have all the necessary information on the back, we ripped it open and discarded it….as is the curse of any good package: it does its job and is then forgotten at the conscience level.

When you too rip open your Vertex package and remove the interior box you may notice a slight difference between it and the Apex line. Unlike the Apex which was housed in a protective high density foam container on all sides, the Vertex sits in high density foam but the top “flap” is thicker, hollow and made from cardboard and the bottom is just plain old cardboard. This is overprotection at its best folks.


The list of accessories is about what we expected and unfortunately no right angle locking SATA cable (or any cable for that matter) was included. In a nut shell you get an instruction pamphlet….and that is it. We were disappointed that OCZ did not chose to include a jumper for firmware upgrades, nor instructions on how (or even where to get) firmware upgrades. Heck, we know the TRIM program (aka wiper.exe) is still in beta…but it would have been nice to have had it at least preloaded on the drive if a mini-CD is too costly for OCZ’s bottom line.