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Only hours after the OCZ Storage Solutions has been announced as the newest member of the Toshiba Group Company, , OCZ is releasing a brand new 460 Series SSD, relying on new partnerships and Toshiba NAND flash memory.
If anything, the OCZ story is sure to make an interesting novel one day but, the release of this SSD shows us that the OCZ team has become very good at staying on the right track and deflecting what some might consider serious diversions. Their possession of what might be one of the world’s top SSD controllers, the Barefoot 3, might have a great deal to do with that.
On release of this report, the Vertex 460 SSD should be available
in capacities of 120, 240 and 480GB and MSRP pricing is listed as $99.99, $189.99 and 359.99, bringing it to a low price of about .74/GB. It’s best performance can be seen in the 480GB capacity with 545MB/s read and 525MB/s write and up to 95K IOPS, however, performance decreases slightly as the capacity decreases as displayed in these specs:
You might notice that OCZ highlights steady state performance and this is the second time we have seen this with a OCZ SSD, the first evident in our review of the Vector 150. The benefit to this is that it allows us to enhance our testing just a bit and, once again, you will see some extensive steady state and mixed load testing. OCZ details endurance of 20GB host writes per day for 3 years through a typical client workload, this number being pretty much impossible to reach leaving us with an SSD that will last for longer than most would expect.
Along with some great performance numbers, packaging lists a 3 year limited warranty and includes a 3.5″ desktop adapter and full retail copy of Acronis True Image HD Cloning Software with activation key.
OCZ VERTEX 460 SSD COMPONENTS
The exterior casing of the 460 is of solid metal cast and protects the printed circuit board (PCB) inside. Four screws are contained on the bottom which secure the base plate and there is a security sticker over one of the screws to prevent tampering. We rip our SSDs apart so you don’t have to.
Once the exterior is disassembled, another four screws must be removed to get a clear view of the PCB. On the top of the PCB, we have the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller and it is numbered IDX500M10-BC.
There are also 16 modules of Toshiba NAND flash memory contained on the PCB, along with two packages of Micron DRAM cache memory, both components evenly distributed on both sides of the device.
The Toshiba memory is numbered TH58TEG7DDJBA4C and it is the same as was used in the OCZ Vector 150 that we reviewed previously. It is Toshiba’s Toggle mode 19nm multi-level cell (mlc) memory and each module is 16GB in capacity.
The total RAW capacity is 256GB (16×16), however, 7% over provisioning has been designated to maintain performance and endurance of this SSD, bringing the advertised capacity to 240GB.
The capacity remaining for storage once formatted is again reduced to a final 224GB. This ‘reduced’ available capacity is typical of all solid state drives.
Les,
Can you elaborate on that edge connector opposite the SATA one? Doesn’t look like M.2 but is suspiciously close. Testing connector?
Word back from OCZ is that it is a debug connector for their use and is not end user accessible at all.
SSDs have been formatted this way for years already and now these guys want to whine about it. Give me a break, as if you can do something about it.
20GB per day?. Didnt You write about 5TB to the disk during tests? (crystaldiskinfo ). it means You almost used this disk for 8 monts. this is a toy not real SSD disk. medicore ssd need at least 0,5-1 DWPD. Good – professional SSD 5-10 DWPD. this is less than 0,1 DWPD. something is wrong with controller and write amplification, something is wrong with flash memory or OCZ just builds bad SSD
I know I should just ignore it, but it still bugs me when I read things like “we get a look at the drives available capacity after formatting (224GB)”. As if formatting is reducing the size from 240GB to 224GB. When the difference is just between Gigabytes (base 10) and Gibibytes (base 2). Drive manufacturers (not just SSDs) report size in base 10 while Windows reports size in base 2.
There is no as if. The capacity after formatting is just that. We are not responsible for the way you interpret. We keep it simple. Thanks ahead.
I am afraid Billy is correct although there was no need for him to be whiny.
In the article you say that formatting reduces the capacity which is factually incorrect. The difference lies in the way operating systems calculate capacity and the way manufacturers calculate capacity. There have been serveral lawsuits against drive manufacturers because of this oversight on their part:
https://gizmodo.com/183980/western-digital-settles-hard-drive-capacity-lawsuit
https://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=1817
Cheers!
Very familiar with your point and quoted articles but couldn’t disagree more. This same argument is always raised by, what I like to call the ‘storage bean counters’ who like to impart their knowledge time and time again about how space is calculated. Unfortunately, most are so tied up in the technical side of the story, that they have trouble with the simplest of statements. Regardless of how you look at it, an advertised 240 GB capacity SSD is reduced when only 224 GB is available to the end user. Different people understand things in different ways and we form our articles to the vast majority who will be reading this article….the typical consumer.
The problem is it’s misleading. I’ve seen customers give disk drives bad ratings because the capacity was “not as advertised”. Actually, it was as advertised. They quoted it in SI units just like every other disk drive manufacturer. It’s the operating system that is incorrect, technically. It should really use the “Gi” prefix. On Linux and Mac OS X, you should see the capacity as 240 GB.
What would be best is if people were aware of the difference.
The average reader isn’t technically sound enough to grasp what you are asking; they simply want to know what is availale to them, at the end of the day.
We would definitely welcome your submission for such an article though.
I have to say, Les has a point. In a way, it’s false advertisement when you consider that every 1TB drive will only ever yield 931GB. And with SSDs, you have further reductions in size, depending on how much it is over-provisioned for longevity’s sake, but the same dissimilar advertising capacity and actual capacity applies.
That said, I think a lot (if not most) consumers have simply come to accept this. I know I have. Add to that the fact that storage is dirt cheap.