OCZ’s new vertex 4 drive is probably the fastest current SSD under most common consumer usage purposes. It is blazing fast and has none of the BSOD issues of previous drives with the new Marvel/Indilinx controller. Therefore, OCZ is confident enough to give this drive a 5 year warranty.
The Vertex 4 has an amazing 120k input/output operations per second which is 40% higher than the Patriot Wildfire (one of fastest, most expensive, BSOD ridden Sandforce controlled drives). However, the sequential write is the one weakness of the Vertex 4. But keep in mind that 95+% (perhaps 99+%) of the time you will be reading from the drive and the read speed is where you’ll see almost all of the speedup. Even if you write on the drive often, there are almost no sources you can draw from that will use up all of the write speed of any newer generation drive. If you are downloading from the internet (even if you are on a 100Mpbs T3 line) you won’t come close to the write speed of a standard hard drive. Alternatively, if you are writing to the SSD from a big data hard drive, the SSD write speed will definitely not be the bottleneck. The only time you will see speedups is with SSD to SSD writes (but how often do you do that?)
OCZ always had the lowest prices and fastest drives before but reliability was a significant issue. I’m glad they finally figured it out. You can now buy one of the cheapest drives out there (prices are comparable to Vertex 3) with speed and reliability. SSD’s sure have come a long way.
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