OCZ Vector (256GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 27, 2012 9:10 PM ESTPower Consumption
With the Vertex 4, OCZ had a fairly power hungry drive on its hands. Thankfully that's well addressed by the Vector and Barefoot 3. Idle power remains higher than I would like; Samsung clearly has the advantage there. Under load however, the Vector is indistinguishable from Samsung's SSD 840 Pro, which is quite remarkable. Only slower drives or SandForce based solutions faced with highly compressible data can offer better load power consumption. In practice, I'd expect OCZ's Vector to be among the most power efficient, high performance drives on the market under load.
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wsaenotsock - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
A 5 year warranty is a pretty solid commitment on the part of a manufacturer. I don't think they would have done that if they didn't trust the stability of the hardware, so they really put their money where their mouth is.Other thing: is the Indilinx co-processor 'Argon' or 'Aragon'? Pic differs from your text description.
alacard - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Nah, you've got it all wrong unfortunately - they've bet the farm on this drive and if it fails they won't be around in five years to honor those warranties.When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.
Kjella - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Well that, but I'm glad to see OCZ committing more to their drives... on my local price price check there's Agility, Colossus, Enyo, Ibis, Lightfoot, Octane, Onyx, Petrol, RevoDrive, Synapse, Vertex and Z-drive not counting numbering or variations like Vertex EX, Vertex Limitied Edition, Vertex Turbo and using a zillion different controllers and stuff. The warranty is also an indication this is the technology they'll continue working on and fixing bugs for, which is good because their attention span has been too short and spread too thin. It's better with a few models that kick ass than dozens of models that are all shoddy.MrSpadge - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Some of the drives you list are several years old..JonnyDough - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Furthermore, the Intel 520 (which I just purchased) got dropped off the enterprise iometer 4KB random write chart. That don't make a lick-a sense!Hood6558 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
alacard may be right, OCZ is sliding closer to the cliff as we speak. There's so much competition in the SSD market, someone's got to go sooner or later, and it will probably be the less diversified companies that will go first. I recently bought a Vertex 4 128 for my boot drive, and it lasted only 15 days before it disappeared and refused to be recognized in BIOS. The Crucial M4 128 that replaced it has the problem of disappearing every time the power is shut off suddenly (or with the power button after Windows hangs), but comes back after a couple of reboots and a resetting of your boot priorities. And it's regarded as one of the most reliable drives out there.So in order for OCZ to remain solvent, the Vector must be super reliable and stable, and absolutely must stay visible in BIOS at all times. If it's plagued by the same problems as the Vertex 4, it's time to cash out and disappear before the bankruptcy court has it's way.
Sufo - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Windows hanging? I smell problems with the user...djy2000 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
That warranty doesn't cover the most important thing. The data on the drive.Bull Dog - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Is that an m-SATA connector on the other side of the PCB?philipma1957 - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
good question if I open the case can i use this as a msata?a 512gb msata is very hard to find.