1st deliveries of the Vertex 3

The much anticipated OCZ Vertex 3s are starting to arrive in stores in 120 and 240 GB versions. Quantities are however limited and generally being absorbed by pre-orders in spite of pricing in the region of €250 for the 120 GB version and €500 for the 240 GB version.

This SSD is the first SSD to come onto the market using the SandForce SF-2281, which is combined with 25nm IMFT MLC Flash here. This new generation controller gives sequential read and write speeds of over 500 MB/s, as long as, for writes, it’s working with highly compressible data.

Here are the figures given by OCZ in terms of performance for the 120, 240 and 480 GB models:

- Reads: 550, 550 and 530 MB/s
- Writes: 500, 520 and 450 MB/s
- Random reads: 20K, 40K and 50K IOPS
- Random writes: 60K, 60K and 40K IOPS

All these figures were obtained with highly compressible data, the most favourable for the SandForce architecture. With actual files, the figures will be lower, especially in writes, but these first figures do nevertheless show quite significant differences in terms of random read perforamnce, with the 120 GB version doing a lot worse than the others here.

Note however that these figures were obtained with 32 simultaneous accesses and the gap isn’t likely to be as big with fewer simultaneous accesses (closer to real usage patterns). The 480 GB version however gives lower performance in random reads. It will be interesting to see what the difference is with data that can’t be compressed.