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The drive arrives in a very stylish black and silver accented box.
On the front is primary information on the unit, showcasing Multi Level Cell technology and TRIM support.
The back of the box offers more detailed specifications, such as performance speeds as well as shock resistance.
The drive itself is also very attractively designed with a subtle scheme sure to offend noone. There is 128GB of flash memory onboard which ties in with previous reports on the Vertex 2 Pro and Vertex LE drives that use Sandforce controllers. The unit is a 2.5” design and weighs under 100 grams.
This positive flash count ‘discrepancy' is actually related to Sandforce demands – there has to be an additional 20% of flash set aside for the DuraWrite technology, which is in place to reduce write amplification. It also helps to increase endurance.
OCZ also supply a 3.5 inch bay adapter which is attached to the rear of the internal box, this seems to be a common (and welcome) addition in 2010.
Interestingly the drive has no DRAM cache which is again related to the use of Sandforce controller. Sandforce has a sophisicated algorithm in place which means it has smaller tables to manage and writes less to the onboard flash. The upside to this system is that because there is less data to write, manufacturers can reduce their overheads by using slightly cheaper memory.
The SF-1200 has cache memory onboard and although no information has been released detailing this, we would assume it to be several megabytes in size. Inside the controller there is a Tensilica DC 570T CPU core, which helps to manage drive performance.
The Vertex 2 uses Intel flash memory seen in the image above as “29F64G08CAMDB”. There are 16 chips in total with 8GB capacity on each of them. When you compare the rated performance of 285 and 275 mb/s for read and write respectively to the original drive, this translates to a huge improvement of around 15% on reads and 55% on writes.
Power consumption is rated at 2 watts when active and 0.5 watts in standby and there is also full RAID 0 support.
