OCZ Vertex TURBO 120GB Solid State Drive

 

Before reviewing the OCZ Vertex Turbo I had very high hopes that it would become a clear leader in the current crop of solid state drives OC3D have reviewed. 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.

 

I was initially dismayed that the drive did not peak at the advertised speeds and instead provided results that were actually quite a lot lower, hitting 242 MB/s according to CrystalDisk, some 28MB/s slower than what OCZ claim the drive is capable of . This is not a major issue though because it is a rare day indeed that specifications result into what you would get in the ‘real world’ with the usual ‘upto XXXMB/s’ disclaimer applying itself in this instance. At the time of writing this review, there were no available firmware updates to enhance this speed so the 1.0 version was used throughout the testing. With OCZ’s fantastic support, I have no doubts that future firmware releases will increase the performance to that closer of the advertised speed.

 

I encountered absolutely no stuttering while using this drive as the main boot drive housing Windows Vista 64bit over a two week period and this is where I feel the drive comes into it’s own. While some weight has to be added to the benchmarks we have run today, real-time usage of the drive also has to be considered and perhaps equally weighted. The drive was the quickest SSD on test in terms of Vista boot up and shutdown and more or less matched our previous quickest drive in the game level loading test. There is little to choose performance wise between the two drives, especially when it comes to the real world tests where you would struggle to fit a cigarette paper between the two. With that in mind there is no doubting that the OCZ drive is certainly a rapid, high performing  piece of kit.

 

The OCZ Vertex Turbos biggest obstacle however is it’s price. Costing some £54 more than GSkill’s offering at around the £340 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 overclocked 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 caliber can make to a high end computer system.

 

– Fantastic performance

– Slight improvement over the stock Vertex

– 3 year warranty

– 180MHz cache

 

– Did not reach advertised speeds during testing

– No included jumper for firmware flashing

 

– The price may discourage potential buyers