OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

It's been a while since last providing a Phoronix review of a solid-state drive from OCZ Technology, but now with Serial ATA 3.0 support becoming more prevalent on modern Intel and AMD motherboards, they have been releasing a number of updated products to take advantage of SATA 3.0. In the review we have our hands on an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD as we see how this SATA III SSD performs under Ubuntu Linux.

Serial ATA 3.0 (also known as SATA 6 Gbit/s) provides a peak throughput of 600MB/s, which is double the SATA 2.0 specification of 300MB/s. With blazing fast solid-state drives, many of them can reach their full speeds assuming you're on a SATA 3.0 motherboard like the Intel Sandy Bridge motherboards. The SATA 3.0 specification also provides improvements to Native Command Queuing (NCQ), improved power management capabilities, and supports a smaller connection interface for even smaller storage devices and optical drives. SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible with earlier Serial ATA specifications.

In terms of Linux support for Serial ATA 3.0, I have used SATA 6Gb/s drives on various supported motherboards (mostly those for Sandy Bridge and Llano), namely those motherboards reviewed on Phoronix. Modern Linux distributions should not have any issues detecting and properly using SATA 3.0 devices.

OCZ's current selection of SATA 3.0 SSDs includes the Vertex 3, Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Agility 3, and Solid 3 series. OCZ currently offers the Vertex 3 in 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. For this review, OCZ Technology kindly sent over the 240GB Vertex 3 solid-state drive. Below are the specifications on the VTX3-25SAT3-240G.

- Max Read: up to 550MB/s
- Max Write: up to 520MB/s
- Random Write 4KB: 60,000 IOPS
- Maximum 4K Random Write: 85,000 IOPS
- MLC NAND Flash
- Native TRIM support
- 0.1ms Seek Time
- 2.5-inch Slim Design
- 3 Watt Active Power Consumption, 1.65 Watt Idle
- Shock Resistant Up To 1500G
- RAID Support
- 2 Million Hours MTBF

Included with the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD was a small installation guide, an OCZ "My SSD Is Faster Than Your HDD" sticker, and a 3.5-inch mounting bracket. The included mounting bracket is common to OCZ SSDs and allows for the easy installation of the 2.5-inch SSD into 3.5-inch HDD drive bays, if the computer enclosure doesn't have 2.5-inch drive bays available. The Vertex 3 SSD is backed by a normal three-year warranty. Fortunately, we have yet to have an OCZ solid-state drive fail on us.