OCZ today officially introduced the Vertex 4 SATA III SSD series featuring the company's Indilinx Everest 2 controller platform - developed in-house.
The Vertex 4 promises to deliver the industry's highest input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance for SATA-based drives across a wide variety of application workloads. OCZ claims that the new SSD provided consistent performance regardless of whether the data streams are in compressed or uncompressed formats.
Powered by its new Indilinx Everest 2 controller platform, featuring a dual core architecture and 400 MHz clock speeds, the Vertex 4 eliminates the need for internal data compression - met in Sandforce-based controllers - further enhancing drive reliability. This controller architecture also includes key features such as an advanced error correction code (ECC) engine, dynamic wear-leveling, auto encryption, and Indilinx's next generation Ndurance 2.0 NAND flash management technology, enabling OCZ to support the Vertex 4 SSD line with a 5-year warranty.
Ndurance 2.0, embedded within the Everest 2 platform, overcomes NAND flash memory shortcomings to extend NAND flash life well beyond the manufacturer rated program and erase cycle specifications. It ensures that the Vertex 4 can be reliably used in a wide range of computing environments over an extended lifetime. This NAND flash management suite not only radically extends NAND flash memory life, but provides enterprise-class endurance even when commodity-grade NAND flash is used.
The Vertex 4 SSD will be available this month through OCZ's global channel in 128 GB to 512 GB capacities with MSRPs of $179, $349 and $699 respectively, stacking up well against Intel's 520 series. According to the reviews published online so far, the general feedback is that the Vertex 4 is reliable and indeed excels in certain key benchmarks like random write performance. On the other hand, read performance and some other real-world benchmarks were less earth-shattering.
