OCZ Vector Series SSD review: Arguably the fastest SSD to date

The OCZ Vector is one of many solid-state drives I've reviewed from OCZ Technology Group, but it's the first that's truly OCZ-made. The new drive comes with all components designed by OCZ, including the controller.

The OCZ Vector is a high-end SSD designed to compete with the recently reviewed Samsung 840 Pro, and in my testing, it proved to be a formidable contender, in both performance and looks. The new ultrathin (7-millimeter) drive comes standard with a drive-bay converter, which also lets it fit easily inside desktops, as well as laptops and ultrabooks.

The drive currently costs about the same as the Samsung 840, and breaks down to just slightly more than $1 per gigabyte. If you're looking for a fast SSD for your system, be it a Windows computer or a Mac, the OCZ Vector would make an excellent choice, as far as performance is concerned. If you want a drive that offers better battery life for your portable computer, however, consider the Samsung 840 Pro, or even the Samsung 830 Series.

Design and features

Drive type	7mm-thick, 2.5-inch standard internal drive
Connector options	SATA 3 (6Gbps), SATA 2, SATA
Available capacities	128GB, 256GB, 512GB
Product dimensions	7mm-thick, 2.5-inch standard
Capacity of test unit	512GB
Controller	OCZ Boot Foot 3
Flash memory type	OCZ 25nm IMFT synchronous 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND
OSes supported	Windows, Mac, Linux

Coming in the now familiar 7mm chassis, the new OCZ Vector still manages to look very different from the rest of OCZ's SSDs, or the rest of the SSDs on the market, for that matter. It has a colored aluminum casing with a new, eye-catching label on top. The bottom of the drive remains much the same as the rest of OCZ's SSDs, showing the part number as well as other technical information. Still, the overall look of the OCZ Vector suggests that it's not just another SSD from OCZ.

On the inside, the drive sports OCZ-branded NAND flash memory and an OCZ-made Barefoot 3 controller. Though the previous Octane and Vertex 4 drives also used somewhat nontraditional Indilinx controllers, that controller itself is not made entirely by OCZ, as is the Barefoot 3. The new controller is designed to offer high performance but currently isn't capable of providing hardware encryption. This is not a big deal, however, since encryption is hardly used on the client side for general consumers, partly because many computer motherboards don't support it.

Supporting the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, the OCZ Vector's energy usage rating is not as impressive as those of the aforementioned Samsung SSDs. The Vector requires 2.25W when working and 0.9W when idle, much higher than the .068W (working)/.042W (idle) rating of the Samsung 840 Pro. Even the much older Samsung 830, with a 0.24 (working)/0.14(idle) rating, beats the Vector in terms of energy efficiency. While I didn't have time to test how the Vector affects a laptop's battery, my guess is it would probably cut down the battery life by 15 to 20 minutes compared with the Samsung 840 Pro.

Energy usage aside, the OCZ Vector worked well with both Windows and Mac OS in my trials. The drive comes with a five-year warranty. OCZ's warranty policy is a little interesting. The company guarantees that the drive will last at least five years if you write 20GB to it per day, every day. Consequently, the warranty of the Vector expires after five years or after 36.5TB of writes, whichever comes first. It's quite hard to determine how much data has been written to the drive, however, so keep that in mind.

The reason the daily written amount is a concern is because generally SSDs have limited program/erase (P/E) cycles, which dictate how many times you can write and rewrite information on a memory cell before it won't retain new information anymore. In real-world usage this is not really a big issue since most of us don't write more than 10GB on a computer's internal drive in a day, let alone every day. Still, heavy users, such as video-editing professionals, should pick a different type of SSD or use very fast standard hard drives for their work.