OCZ today officially introduced the Vertex 4 SATA III SSD series featuring the company's Indilinx Everest 2 controller platform - developed in-house. The Vertex 4 promises to deliver the industry's highest input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance for SATA-based drives across a wide variety of application workloads. OCZ claims that the new SSD provided consistent performance regardless of whether the data streams are in compressed or uncompressed formats.

The Vertex 4 features sequential bandwidth up to 535 MB/s, maximum random performance up to 120,000 IOPS, and with hard to manage incompressible data, delivers 95,000 4K random read IOPS and 85,000 random write IOPS. In comparison to OCZ's previous generation Vertex 3 SSD, rated at 60,000 sustained 4K random write IOPS, the Vertex 4 doubles typical transactional performance. The Vertex 4 also generates an as low as 0.04 ms latency for read operations and 0.02ms for write operations, delivering an improvement of approximately 80 percent over the Vertex 3. In typical use case scenarios, the Vertex 4 outperforms the Vertex 3 by as much as 400 percent.

OCZ SSDs
	OCZ Vertex 4	OCZ Vertex 3	OCZ Octane	OCZ Vertex 2
Current NAND	25nm IMFT MLC	25nm IMFT MLC	25nm IMFT MLC	25nm IMFT MLC
Capacities	128, 256, 512GB	60, 90, 120, 240, 480GB	128, 256, 512GB, 1TB	60, 120, 240GB
Controller	Indilinx Everest 2	SF-2281	Indilinx Everest	SF-1221
Max Seq Read	535 MB/s	550 MB/s	480 MB/s	285 MB/s
Max Seq Write	475 MB/s	500 MB/s	330 MB/s	275 MB/s
Max Random Read	95K IOPS	60K IOPS	26K IOPS	-
Max Random Write	85K IOPS	85K IOPS	35K IOPS	50K IOPS
AES-256 Encryption	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

 

OCZ Vertex 4
	512GB	256GB	128GB
NAND	16 x 32GB 25nm Intel sync NAND	16 x 16GB 25nm Intel sync NAND	8 x 16GB 25nm Intel sync NAND
DRAM	2 x 512MB DDR3-800	2 x 512MB DDR3-800*	2 x 512MB DDR3-800*
Controller	Indilinx Everest 2	Indilinx Everest 2	Indilinx Everest 2
Max Seq Read	535 MB/s	535 MB/s	535 MB/s
Max Seq Write	475 MB/s	380 MB/s	200 MB/s
Max Random Read	95K IOPS	90K IOPS	90K IOPS
Max Random Write	85K IOPS	85K IOPS	85K IOPS
MSRP	$699	$349	$179

Powered by its new Indilinx Everest 2 controller platform, featuring a dual core architecture and 400 MHz clock speeds, the Vertex 4 eliminates the need for internal data compression - met in Sandforce-based controllers - further enhancing drive reliability. This controller architecture also includes key features such as an advanced error correction code (ECC) engine, dynamic wear-leveling, auto encryption, and Indilinx's next generation Ndurance 2.0 NAND flash management technology, enabling OCZ to support the Vertex 4 SSD line with a 5-year warranty.

Ndurance 2.0, embedded within the Everest 2 platform, overcomes NAND flash memory shortcomings to extend NAND flash life well beyond the manufacturer rated program and erase cycle specifications. It ensures that the Vertex 4 can be reliably used in a wide range of computing environments over an extended lifetime. This NAND flash management suite not only radically extends NAND flash memory life, but provides enterprise-class endurance even when commodity-grade NAND flash is used.

The Vertex 4 SSD will be available this month through OCZ's global channel in 128 GB to 512 GB capacities with MSRPs of $179, $349 and $699 respectively, stacking up well against Intel's 520 series. According to the reviews published online so far, the general feedback is that the Vertex 4 is reliable and indeed excels in certain key benchmarks like random write performance. On the other hand, read performance and some other real-world benchmarks were less earth-shattering.