OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Solid State Drive Review

If there is one area in this industry which seems to be evolving at a break neck pace it is the storage market and its new poster child: Solid State drives. In the SSD arena, yesterday’s champion can be today’s “also ran”. In fact, this niche is evolving so quickly that unless you are right on top of things it is quite easy to become dazed and confused with terms like Over-Provisioning, TRIM, cell wear and write life. Unfortunately, this also means there are few –if any- “safe” choices out there that can protect your investment in the months ahead.

With that being said, one company’s flagship model proved to be a well placed choice though many didn’t know it at the time. Vertex series of drives from OCZ continue to weather the storm of quickly expanding SSD technology and still offer some of the best performance around. Today we are going to look at the brand new OCZ Vertex 3 240GB to see if this new iteration lives up to the “Vertex” brand name.

Due to past experiences, our expectations for this drive are naturally quite high. After all, it sports the latest 25nm NAND and SandForce’s newest SATA 6 Gb/s controller so the potential for groundbreaking speeds is certainly there. Unfortunately, there are some concerns bumping around the market regarding the lifespan afforded by 25nm NAND but we’ll get to that a bit later.

Helping balance out concerns over the NAND is the fact that your hard earned dollar does go further with this drive than it has ever gone before. The 240GB version of the Vertex 2 was very expensive, and while a real world online price of about $450 for the Vertex 3 is not exactly “cheap”, it is now low enough to be within the realm of feasibility for many.