OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD
2. The package
The OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD (OCZSSD2-1VTX60G) costs ~ $229 ($199 after $30 mail-in rebate). This is translated to $3.76 per gigabyte, when the 120GB model comes with a better gigabyte/price ratio ($3.06). Recently OCZ increased the warranty for its SSD to 3 years, matching the warranty usually offered for the hard disk drives.
You can see the black and white retail package below:
The product is well-packaged inside an anti static bag to avoid damage caused by electrostatic discharge.
The 2.5" drive is very light at 77grams:
The drive has the typical SATA connectors and also some extra pins placed on the right side used for firmware upgrade. Thought OCZ does not provide any jumpers to use for the firmware upgrade, we flashed the drive without shorting these pins as you will see in the following page.
The drive uses a Indilinx Barefoot controller and 64MB cache by Elpida Memory. We should note that we have to do with an MLC solution here, which generally costs less than SLC products. In theory SLC drives should be faster although the latest controllers found in the new MLC SSDs work quite well. On the other hand, SLC products seem to offer better data protection since they produce less read/write cycles.