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When consumer SSDs were still in their infancy OCZ was quick to fill the market with SandForce force powered SSDs. This quick release of products came at a price. Due to issues with firmware consumers wound up with unreliable SSDs. It wasn’t until OCZ decided to switch over to their in house Indilinx controller that their SSDs started to become better, however, the company had already reached its breaking point by 2013. In January of last year Toshiba acquired OCZ’s assets which sparked a new life into the OCZ SSDs. OCZ revamped their product line and used their in house Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller along with Toshiba’s A19 Toggle MLC NAND to provide SSDs that live up to Toshiba’s company’s quality standards. In March of this year they released the final update to the high-end SSD segment, which also brings us to this week’s SSD of the Week, the OCZ Vector 180.
The OCZ Vector 180 is a 2.5” 7mm, SATA 6Gb/s SSD that is available in the 120GB ($89.99), 240GB ($149.99), 480GB ($269.99), and 960GB ($499.99) capacities. When looking at the rated speeds we see good comparative sequential read results topping out at 550MB/s and sequential write reaching a max of 530MB/s. The IOPS parallel the sequential speeds by reaching 100K read and 95K write while sustained write reaches no less than 23K IOPS.
OCZ has put some pretty good features into their newest SSD. The Vector 180 features AES 256-bit encryption; however it does not support TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 standards. Data path protection is established via BCH ECC and it corrects up to 44 random bits/KB. They have even added a new protective feature, Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+). It detects power anomalies and protects data at rest and helps to prevent bricking through a backup capacitor and firmware design. The Vector 180 has a MTBF rating of 2.3 million hours and endurance is rated at 50GB per day for the span of the 5-year ShieldPlus warranty, which comes out to just over 91TB. They have also released a new SSD management tool that they call SSD Guru and it rivals both Samsung’s Magician and SanDisk’s SSD Dashboard. It features a wide variety of tools that cover maintenance, health monitoring, OS and SSD tuning, and firmware updating.
If you have owned an OCZ SSD before and have had doubts about their products since, dismay no longer for OCZ has gone through a good deal of trouble to provide only the best for their new SSD. Furthermore, in our review we gave it our Gold Seal award for its SheildPlus warranty, competitive pricing, and great performance.