OCZ Launches Next-Gen Vertex 450 SSDs

It wasn’t that long ago that OCZ launched its completely in-house and widely acclaimed Vector SSD family (our review) as the company’s flagship solid-state drive, seemingly ending the long and rich history of the Vertex name. Apparently, that has now changed as OCZ announced late last week the Vertex 450 SSD, utilizing a tweaked “Barefoot 3 M10” controller.

For those curious, the Vertex brand got its start back in 2009 as, ironically enough, an Indilinx Barefoot powered SSD.  OCZ’s Vertex just so happened to be the first genuine competitor to the original Intel X25-M SSDs that have been credited with crystallizing the SSD market.

The Vertex 450 will not be replacing the Vector, but instead will slot in as an upper-midrange alternative at a more affordable price point. The Barefoot 3 M10 offers a few notable refinements over both the Vertex 4 and the Vector, starting with a “power-optimized” clock  generator and a more power-efficient controller clockspeed versus the Vertex 4. This sounds promising for consumers that are specifically looking for power efficient SSDs for mobile use, because as we have pointed out in our reviews, just because a drive is an SSD doesn’t mean it consumes less power than a mobile disk drive. Important to note is that unlike the flagship Vector, the Vertex 450 will offer native AES-256 hardware encryption as well.

The Vertex 450 will be utilizing the newer 20nm MLC NAND flash from IMFT, with OCZ noting that it buys flash by the wafer and does the testing, validation, and packaging of the NAND flash itself in order to provide cost savings directly to the consumer. Everything else is pretty standard fare with drives ranging from 128GB to 512GB in capacity. The 256GB model will slot in at $235 and is expected to deliver 540MB/s and 85,000 4KB IOPS read performance, with 525MB/s and 90,000 4KB IOPS write performance. Just as with the V4 the Barefoot 3 M10 is not reliant on data compression to achieve best performance. The Vertex 450 will come with the standard three year warranty (the Vector offers five), but will still retain the high quality metal alloy housing that we liked about the Vector. OCZ also includes a single-piece 3.5” bay adapter and a copy of Acronis True Image cloning software with Vertex 450 drives.