OCZ have recently unleashed the Vertex Turbo range of Solid State Drives which build on the phenomenally fast Vertex series, The original drive was reviewed like the majority of our reviews ‘out-of-the-box’ but newer firmware has since been released which increases performance even further and as such we are awaiting the latest firmware update for the Vertex Turbo which is receiving excellent reports thanks to the update incorporating much needed features such as garbage collection and TRIM support.
Using the same Indilinx Barefoot controller of both the Vertex line and our current fastest SSD, the GSkill Falcon, OCZ are sticking to what is perhaps the best controller on the market. Fear not though because with 3rd generation SATA just around the corner boasting up to 6GBps the phenomenal bandwidth of upcoming drives will be accomodated.
One of the biggest drawbacks of SSD technology is that over a period of time NAND flash memory is effected by data fragmentation which can cause the drives to slow down considerably. While some sompetitors drives still suffer from this degradation, OCZ’s exclusive firmware will maintain the drives peak performance throughout it’s lifetime without any maintenance from the consumer thanks to the built in ‘optimizer’.
Therefore, to test the write performance of each storage device a freeware utility called Dummy File Creator was used to generate files directly to each of the hard disks. The first 16GB benchmark writes a collection of files ranging in size from 1GB to 100KB, whereas the 100GB benchmark writes a single file of exactly that size to the disk.
Sadly, the results from the benchmarks show otherwise. While the OCZ Vertex Turbo is certainly a high performance drive, we found that the improvements over the standard Vertex, while noticeable were not significant enough to topple our fastest SSD to date, the GSkill Falcon. That’s only part of the story though as the Vertex Turbo WAS the fastest drive to use outside of the synthetic benchmarks. In terms of ‘real world’ usage, the drive felt just as, if not more snappy than the Falcon drive which goes to show, you cannot place too much emphasis on synthetic analysis.
The OCZ Vertex Turbo’s biggest obstacle however is it’s price. Costing some $124US more than GSkill’s offering at around the $390 mark, anyone looking for a top end MLC based SSD is going to find it difficult to justify that extra cash when similar (and at times faster) speeds can be had for less. Sure, speed binned NAND chips are going to be more expensive to source, as is the over-clocked cache but when these appear to add little to the performance of an already outstanding drive one has to wonder how that extra cash injection can be justified. The 3 year warranty will go some way to advocate the extra outlay as would OCZ’s terrific support, both of which a fair chunk so a lot will depend on how much value you place on these two propositions. Should you decide to lay claim to the OCZ Vertex Turbo, one thing I can guarantee you is blistering performance, the likes of which you have to experience to believe and no amount of text can describe the improvements an SSD of this calibre can make to a high end computer system.