OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS SSD Review

This time, we received a full retail package with an image of the product on the front as well as a short listing of specifications.

Inside, the drive is wrapped in an antistatic bag. There are also some mounting screws, a little user manual and a 3.5 inch tray for system installation.

The drive looks very regal, with the simple gold sticker and black chassis. The rear is a metallic finish with product information listed.

OCZ are using 3xNM NAND in this unit. The Sandforce 2281 controller is capable of parallel read and write performance above 500 MB/s when used with a good SATA 3 controller. OCZ's shift to 3xNM NAND is certainly aimed at increasing performance … it is more expensive to produce. The rated power drain is 1.65 watts when idle and 3 watts when loaded. It is shock resistant to 1500G and has a MTBF expectancy of 2 million hours. The drive has an ECC recovery up to 55 bits correctable per 512 byte sector. It also has full TRIM support, which would be expected.

There are 16 modules of 16GB Toshiba NAND flash memory in the drive which is 32nm flash memory. The total capacity is rated to 256GB with one module driven for over provisioning. Before formatting, the drive is set at 240GB, this reduces to around 223GB after a Windows format.

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