OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD
Examination:
From the exterior, the Vertex 2 really does not really look different from any other OCZ SSD on the market aside from carrying a Vertex 2 sticker. There is just the standard Serial ATA power and data connection on the OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G with no integrated mini-USB connector or anything else on this drive.
The Vertex 2 series deploys a SandForce SF-1200 SSD controller. The SF-1200 processor supports AES 128-bit encryption, DuraClass technology, RAISE technology, MLC NANDs, ECC recovery, and a five-year customer lifecycle. The SandForce SF-1200 is targeted for desktop and notebook SSDs while there is a SF-1500 processor for enterprise environments. Besides the Vertex 2, other solid-state drives using the SF-1200 include Corsair's Force, Mushkin's Callisto, A-DATA S599, and the OCZ Agility 2.
Linux Testing:
On OCZ's web-site along with mentioning Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X operating system support, they do mention the Vertex 2 SSD is compatible with Linux. It is nice to see Linux support acknowledged on such products, but with SSDs, it is not common to have Linux compatibility issues. In fact, we have not encountered any Linux-specific problems with any of the dozen or so SSDs that have been within the Phoronix testing labs. However, within our forums there have been reports of Linux problems with the Vertex 2. Two users have mentioned problems of installing Ubuntu Linux to the Vertex 2 SSD, which installs fine, but once in the desktop any settings or files "saved" to the disk will be wiped upon shutting down. We have been testing the OCZ Vertex 2 for about one month using Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshots, Fedora 14 Alpha, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and various other Linux distributions and have yet to been able to reproduce this issue. We have also tested this drive with EXT4, Btrfs, and ZFS file-systems without any problems.
We have already published some Linux benchmarks of the OCZ Vertex 2 in Btrfs, EXT4 & ZFS On A Solid-State Drive, Using Disk Compression With Btrfs To Enhance Performance, and Running The Linux 2.6.35 Kernel With A Core i7 Notebook. In this review though we have more benchmarks to deliver up comparing the Vertex 2 performance under Linux to the 60GB Solid 2, 120GB Agility, and 60GB Vertex SSDs, all of which were manufactured by OCZ Technology.
The system hooked up to these SSDs was an Intel Core i7 920 CPU overclocked to 3.6GHz, an ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard, 3GB of DDR3 system memory, and ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics. On the Linux side was Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS with GCC 4.4.3, xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, GNOME 2.30.2, and the Linux 2.6.36-rc3 kernel manually installed. All of these SSDs were tested with the EXT4 file-system on the Linux 2.6.36 code-base. The Phoronix Test Suite handled all of the solid-state drive benchmarking.