Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ocz vector which has one of the cleanest shrink wraps I've ever seen it's really hard to get a handle on this I mean I maybe this is part of their whole like restructuring they've gone through I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to the to the stock news and all that kind of stuff but ocz went through a huge restructuring CEO is gone replaced by replaced by another guy and they laid off a significant portion of their workforce with the idea being that they're going to get leaner and meaner and more focused on you know behaving like the very large company that they have now become so the vector is the longest development cycle that we've ever seen from an ocz SSD it took longer than 18 months to bring to market which means that they were I mean think about that for a second that means back when you know vertex 3 was riding high they were already working on this in addition to having vertex 4 in the pipeline and this is the true next generation replacement to anything that we've seen over the last little while from ocz this has just taken a very long time to bring to market for context previous ocz products have taken less than 12 months to actually bring them to the market so they are much more focused on validation and compatibility and delivering a more consistent user experience so what that means is this drive should be far and away the finest thing we've ever seen out of ocz which is very very exciting I mean remember something guys ocz has taken a lot of flack over the years for issues with in delinks controller drives issues with sandforce controller drives because their whole thing is they were always first to market with it so all these ocz drives were out there and even though every other manufacturer had the same issues ocz took a lot of the flat because they had more drives out there so there were more people complaining about them whereas now they've decided we're going to take a completely different approach we're not going to release this thing till it's completely ready I haven't heard any complaints about the vector yet in terms of performance it is right up there with samsung's new 840 pro I mean think about that I mean back when ocz was saying okay yeah we're going to be an SSD company you're kind of looking at going okay well Intel was just dominating back then with the x.25 series and you're kind of going oh yeah okay let's see if these guys can go up against the juggernaut like in town that Intel's kind of faded away now we're kind of we were kind of saying all you know samsung launched 842 840 pro how are they going to go up against the juggernaut like that while they figured out a way so the vector is very competitive with the 840 pro series it uses 25 nanometer mlc flash so it's not using TLC flash like the 840 which causes it to have new not very good write speeds compared to a flagship product that is using mlc flash remember TLC means three bits per cell as opposed to two bits per cell which is what we're seeing in the higher-end drives right right the most exciting thing about this it comes with the two and a half two inch to three and a half in to know that something most exciting thing about it this is also the first ocz SSD you see this in the links infused thing here so if you guys remember the original end links barefoot controller back in the vertex and everyone else had access to that too that was the first generation in Billings controller then barefoot to never really seemed to come to life from unless that's what they ended up branding the one in the octane and the vertex 4 so then finally there was another any links control of that was actually not ocz designs silicon that was a marvel controller that was then repurposed with a with an ocz firmware this is designed in-house by the plx team the in the links team and another sort of segment of the team based out of OC Z's California headquarters so it is designed from the ground up it uses an ARM Cortex core and an Aragon coprocessor whatever that guy does ocz is not sort of giving out all of the details about how exactly that works but it is completely actually designed by them both hardware and firmware and then they're just finding a fab to manufacture the chips for them i mean same thing goes for the flash itself its intel flash so ocz doesn't actually manufacture the flash but their packaging it themselves so once you actually open up the drive everything's ocz in there comes with all the mounting options you'll need for your notebook so there's your side mounts there's your bottom mounts idle power consumption is a little bit higher than something like a samsung 840 pro boatload they're very very close which means that it's totally suitable for notebook use however I think most people still these days are buying these high-performance SSDs for desktop use it's warrantied for up to five year are up to five years well yeah up to five years or I think it's something some number of Tara I can't remember exactly how many terabytes but their warranty it for 20 gigs per day for five years so think about that for a minute I mean just for fun try to figure out how many gigs you write to your boot drive every day I can pretty much guarantee you it's a lot less than 20 gigabit gigabytes and then you know you go away for a week on vacation maybe you don't use your computer every single day now you've banked up some more too i realistically if you don't get more than five years out of this drive then i'll be very very surprised in terms of performance it's right up there with drives like the 840 pro hangs with pretty much well I mean the 840 pro has been in a league of its own for a little while so it hangs with that which means it is a perfect choice for an enthusiast grade top-tier SSD it also provides very consistent performance whether it's the fact that it has trim which I mean any sort of modern SSD has or whether it's you know how how cluttered up the drive is or whatever else is going on with it it responds very very consistently which to me is what SSD is all about because you can take a hard drive and you can go okay yeah I'm going to write a sequential file or read a sequential file yeah it's almost as fast as an SSD her it's not about that it's about when things get rough when things get fragmented on the actual drive itself how well does it react when it has to rely mostly on its random performance and the vector performs very very well so thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look for those of you who need a summary most important things to take away our true flagship performance drive the first truly ocz design right down to the very heart and soul of the drive that we've seen yet and five year warranty so it's right up there with everything else like the until 5 20 series don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos