OCZ Vector 150 (120GB & 240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 7, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Indilinx
- Vector 150
Final Words
The Vector 150 is a logical successor for the Vector. It doesn't redefine SSD performance, yet OCZ has managed to add enough improvements to the Vector 150 to make it a different product. The first one is IO consistency. While the Vector had good performance consistency to begin with, the Vector 150 takes that one step further. It's without a doubt one of the most consistent (if not the most consistent) SSDs we have tested and that's a big achievement. Especially for heavy workloads with lots of random writes the IO consistency is a very important performance metric because the drives tend to be in steady-state (or close to it) due to the amount of writes and you definitely don't want your application to be waiting for your SSD.
The second major improvement is endurance. 50GB/day for five years should cover almost any power user's need for endurance (or if not, you should really invest in an enterprise class SSD). Remember that it's 50GB seven days a week for five years -- even one day with less writes a week will give you even more headroom to play with.
Power consumption is the only thing I have a problem with. For desktops the power consumption obviously plays no role (unless you're building a huge RAID array and want it to be as power efficient as possible) but for mobile it's one of the cornerstones. Battery life is one of those things where you can never have enough and while the rest of the components usually play the bigger role, an SSD can still have an impact of half an hour or so depending on your laptop.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (11/6/2013) | |||
| 120/128GB | 240/256GB | 480/512GB | |
| OCZ Vector 150 (MSRP) | $130 | $240 | $500 |
| OCZ Vector | $125 | N/A | N/A |
| OCZ Vertex 450 | $115 | $220 | $460 |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $100 | $180 | $340 |
| Samsung SSD 840 Pro | $128 | $215 | $570 |
| Crucial M500 | $120 | $155 | $370 |
| SanDisk Extreme II | $150 | $230 | $460 |
| Seagate SSD 600 | $110 | $200 | $380 |
With the original Vector OCZ shifted their goals and tried to lift up their brand image by focusing purely on the high-end segment and the Vector 150 continues that strategy. As a result, the Vector 150 is definitely at the upper pricing segment but there is always a price you have to pay for performance. Compared to SanDisk's Extreme II, Vector 150's most likely rival, the MSRPs are fairly competitive. At 120GB, the Vector is cheaper but at higher capacities SanDisk has a small advantage. However, it's good to keep in mind that we're dealing with MSRPs, so take the prices with a grain of salt until we see what the retail prices end up being.
All in all, I'm excited to see what OCZ has up their sleeve for their SATA Express (i.e. PCIe) based Barefoot 3 successor. We've been limited by the SATA 6Gbps bus for quite a while already, which is why there haven't been any tremendous upgrades in performance compared to what for example the SF-2281 brought when it was first released. The Barefoot 3 is a platform with lots of potential and it shows that OCZ's Indilinx and PLX acquisitions have provided the company with the knowledge they need to stay competitive in the SSD space.
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ssdpro - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Looks pretty good. I like that it is certified for 50GB/day - much higher than the original which makes me think the nand is better. Price will need to get down to 120 or so though, that 1GB/$1 is critical.Solid State Brain - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
OCZ indeed have managed fooling people that these drives are much better than the old ones.Any drive with 3k P/E writes MLC NAND from 128 GB and up, write endurance wise should be able to support at the very least 50 GB of writes per day for 5 years, even taking into account a rather high write amplification of 4.5-5.
It's all mostly about how much manufacturers are willing to risk cannibalizing their enterprise lineup. I don't think OCZ has much left to lose at this point.
Guspaz - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
When a company with a reputation for terrible reliability has their review sample fail, that's a pretty good sign that their reliability is still terrible.romrunning - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... or 3 times... or 4 times...geniekid - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Fool me once, strike one. Fool me twice, strike...three.Guspaz - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Sadly, this was the experience of a friend who made the mistake of buying an OCZ drive. It failed, so he RMA'd it. The replacement failed. So he RMA'd that. THAT replacement failed... Eventually he gave up and bought an Intel drive, which... didn't fail.Samus - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
My last OCZ drive that failed was RMA'ed and the replacement eBayed. Learned my lesson. That was a few years ago, but at the time, NO other drives were failing in OCZ fashion.Kingston SSDNOW, Crucial C300, Intel X25-M/320, Samsung 700-series...they weren't as fast, but they also rarely failed.
deeps6x - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Yep, NEVER AGAIN for me.Much cheaper EVO looks like the bang for the buck winner still. Every six months there is something significantly better for less cost anyway. Why pay premium prices for such a short amount of time at the 'top'? Buy the best 'bang for the buck' products as much as possible.
djscrew - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
my 2nd gen OCZ Revodrive 128 gb has been going strong for 3 yrsSenti - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Buying OCZ SSD is suicide. Even with impressive hardware it's just not worth the problems. I can tell as the user of quite a premium drive from them: Revodrive 3. No TRIM support, drivers only for Win7 (and not even planned for anything else), horrible boot times (due to its bios insisting on showing some useless information, you can even press Space to reduce this time that proves that it would be easy to improve the situation if the company was willing to improve things as users asked).