OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

From the outside, the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD looks just like any other 2.5-inch solid-state drive and is almost identical to the earlier OCZ Vertex and OCZ Vertex 2, but with the label reflecting that it's a Vertex 3 model. The drive has a standard 2.5-inch SSD form factor size of 99 x 69 x 9 mm. The weight on this solid-state drive is 77 grams.

Of more interest is what is on the inside of the Vertex 3. There is a SandForce 2281 controller with 2Xnm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. The SandForce SF-2281 controller supports storage capacities between 12GB and 512GB (128GB maximum with SLC memory), up to 20,000 IOPS sustained of 4KB blocks random write, up to 60,000 IOPS (burst) on random reads and writes, DuraClass Technology, SATA 3.0/2.0/1.0 technology, SMART Command Transport, AES-128/AES-256 data encryption, and ECC recovery.

The SF-2281 is quite a popular SSD controller used by several different vendors. On the Windows side, there have been reports that the SandForce 2281 controller can cause BSODs and other issues, but from the Linux testing that I have done on the Vertex 3 since receiving it one month ago I have not hit any serious snags under Linux. If there is any, the Linux kernel is seamlessly handling the problems.