OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD review - Vertex
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 04 Mar 2009

Vertex, as a premium line of OCZ's SSD drives should be the perfect high-end product and is marketed as such - with 200MB/s read and 160MB/s write speed clearly stated on the box. We were lucky enough to snatch one of these beauties while wondering the "empty streets of CeBIT" and took it under our wing for a night of fun 'n' games. Translation - relentless testing that you do with such unbelieveable ease, no matter if you haven't slept for a couple of days in a row.

Physically, the drive doesn't look all that much different to other SSD's on the market, and if you compare it to other OCZ SSD's, it's pretty much the same. Except for the fact that it's black. But as we were about to find out, its "dark nature" was something that we're yet gonna learn about after hours and hours of non-stop testing. Playing around with it for hours while still trying to make this damn thing heat up proved to be a Mission Impossible, and this is actually the first thing you notice when you use it. It's unbelieveably fast, but at the same time, it runs dead cold. And I really mean dead cold. It doesn't heat up even after you abuse it with all sorts of stress-testing and performance benchmarking for hours and hours. It just kind of looks back at you with that devilishly dark smile, as if it's asking... "Is that all you've got? Yawn!".

I actually thought that a couple of hours of testing will be enough, which proved to be incorrect. I re-run all of the tests four or five times, depending on the test, just to make sure that I haven't missed something while drinking way, way too much coffeine even for a crazy person. I re-run ATTO, HDtach, PCmark, Everest, then re-run them, and then re-tested again to make sure that I'm not dreaming so... here's what I've got.

First, the testing system:

- ASUS Striker II Extreme nForce 790i motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650
- XpertVision GeForce 9800GX2 VGA
- 4GB OCZ DDR3 memory
- OCZ Vendetta 2 CPU cooler
- Western Digital Raptor 150GB hard drive
- HP 30" LCD
- OCZ ProXstream 1000W power supply

Benchmarks used:

- ATTO disk benchmark
- HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0
- PCMark Vantage Disk Benchmark
- Everest Ultimate Edition 4.60
- SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP1

Let's check out the scores!