OCZ Vertex 4 M (512GB) review: OCZ Vertex 4 M (512GB)

The Vertex 4 is run off Indilinx's Everest 2 controller, and the first product to be wholly directed by OCZ since its purchase of the company. The hardware may be Marvell, but the firmware is all Indilinx.

8.5

OCZ Vertex 4 M (512GB)

The Good

Unbeatable write speeds. Great queued read speeds.

The Bad

Sequential reads aren't as fast as they could go.

The Bottom Line

OCZ's Everest 2 controller is clearly paying dividends with the Vertex 4 — this is an excellent drive indeed.

Given the delay in seeing a third generation SandForce controller, it seems that the move has paid off for OCZ, with the Vertex 4 providing some tasty numbers indeed.

The M in the title denotes that this version (the VTX4-25SAT3-512G.M) uses Micron NAND instead of the usual Intel, which is used by the rest of the range. At AU$439, it's not a bad deal at all. While there's some forum chatter about Micron NAND being slower than Intel, OCZ's spec sheets are identical between the two.

The Vertex 4 is clearly targeted at the desktop, rather than laptops — the drives are 9.3mm high and come with a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch adapter.

For benchmarking, both CrystalDiskMark and Anvil's Storage Utilities were set to 1GB datasets, using incompressible data.

While it's not top dog on sequential reads, it's still very good. Its write speeds are simply untouchable across all our tests, and its queued 4K random read speeds dominate as well. With each new SSD controller and firmware, we seem to get closer to a drive that can do it all. We'd love to see how the 256GB and 128GB editions hold up on our charts in comparison.

OCZ's Everest 2 controller is clearly paying dividends with the Vertex 4 — this is an excellent drive indeed.