Gadgetory

so today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of a new SSD from OCZ this is the vertex 250 gig now the specs for the vertex 250 gig 100 gig 200 gig 60 gig 120 gig and 240 gig it's available in a lot of capacities are pretty much the same now the biggest difference between the vertex 2 and the vertex 1 is that the vertex 2 uses the new sand force controller uses the SF 1200 and the whole vertex 2 series unlike sand force controllers from other manufacturers and unlike the agility 2 series has a special firmware tweak that allows it to get better performance in writes basically okay it's a high-performance design mlc flash memory trim support raid capability all of those pretty much go without saying these days and it includes a three and a half inch SSD adapter for desktops that's pretty neat let's flip around to the back see what OCC has to say for themselves here now this is the trick read up to 285 megabyte per second and right up to 275 megabyte per second with sustained writes up to 250 megabyte per second that's huge because the SandForce controller actually allows mlc flash to write more data than you are actually writing to the disk now I'm gonna explain what that means it's basically compressing the data let's say you've got 10 gigs of data you're gonna just write to your drive it's compressing it on the fly which means compared to the older end links controller it's quite a bit more complicated but it means that maybe even though it's writing 10 gigs of data and then it'll read off 10 gigs of data it might only write 8 gigs of data so that means a your SSD will last longer because you're using fewer write cycles and B it will go faster because you're writing that 10 gigs of data to in only 8 gigs so it'll go 20% faster and I don't have a knife today but that's ok you guys can live while I just cut this open with a pen Wow they've really improved the resiliency of their plastic on the packaging compared to previous vertex series drives there we go it's finally off ok let's get this opened up so see we had a look at the specs oh it opens at the top not the side how innovative okay okay here we go so they've updated their uh their included foamy packaging thing to have like a slot in the back where they stuffed in a two and a half inch to three and a half inch drive adapter so there it is it looks like that I I don't remember if I didn't unboxing on this at some point or not but it's fairly straightforward you just here pull the drive up really quick so you just use the screws on the bottom of the drive strap them in like this and then you attach this to your case using the three and a half inch drive bay holes okay so let's have a look at what else they've included also some mounting screws so four screws to attach the SSD to the adapter and then four screws to mount the adapter in your case thanks ocz then they've also got a warranty card here installation guide and warranty info let's see how long is the warranty on this one hmm four years there you go three year warranty awesome let's get the drive opened up here caution content sensitive to electrostatic discharge open only at a static free workstation okay well hopefully that won't be a problem for us today okay so it looks just like the old vertex drives actually this is kind of funny they have changed the shape of the sticker but they haven't changed the shape of the outline for the sticker in the top of the drive so it's a square cut out with a rounded sticker in it now also they've updated the label with two rather than just vertex excellent improvement there as well your warranty is void if this is removed or broken so you can't take the drive apart and then let's have a look so we got our two and a half inch mounting holes here we got our two and a half inch mounting holes on the other side and then at the bottom we have more two and a half inch standard mounting holes so this will fit in almost any laptop or two and a half inch adapter or case that supports two and a half inch drives is our part number so it is the two VTX series okay and then let me see what else do we have here yeah we've got our SATA to power and SATA to data now these drives do still run off of SATA 2 rather than the new SATA 3 but the reality of it is SATA 3 wouldn't really contribute anything because the maximum performance of SATA 2 is 300 megabit per second or about weight isn't 3 gigabit per second which comes out to roughly and this isn't quite right 300 megabytes per second so at 285 275 for reads and writes this drive is still not bottlenecked by the SATA 2 interface anyway thank you for checking out my unboxing of the OCZ vertex 2 SSD