Vertex 120 GB SSD by OCZ

Normally when I am doing research for new parts for a computer I rarely come across one that impresses me to where I buy the part not only for the work I am doing but for myself.

When this drive was introduced the price was over $300, I did an upgrade for a customer and one of the specifications was a SSD with the read and write speed that is close to a hard drive with the capacity of over 100 GB.

I decided on this SSD over three other candidates because the overall speed was higher and the cost was with in reason for the customer.

At this time this Solid State Drive will cost you just under $0.95 per GB, for a SSD that is very good considering a 1 TB SSD will cost you over $1.50 per GB.

The Vertex 120 GB SSD by OCZ specifications:

When I bought it the price was a little over $120 with shipping so it worked out to be $1.00 per GB, that for me is cost effective.

Because Microsoft is dropping support for XP soon I decided to install my XP Operating Systems once again, get all the Service Packs up to date then reload all my apps. (And make images of each partition for my backup, an all day process but has to be done!)

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The chart above has a couple of interesting numbers in the specifications:

The read speed is 530 MBPS and the write speed is 420 MBPS (Mega Bits Per Second) that is ten times faster than the older first generation SSD's such as the OCZ 32GB and four times faster than the OCZ 64 GB that I have installed in my laptops.

Another specification that is noticeable is the power consumption, it is lower than most other current SSD's on the market. Although I am using this in a tower computer it would be better utilized in a laptop where low power consumption is important when operating on battery power.

I rate this drive a 9 out of 10...

Nine because it is big enough to have multiple Operating Systems as a boot drive. It is almost as fast as a normal hard drive with out the noise. This drive is worth considering if you are upgrading your computer's start up drive. The limiting factor in this rating is the support from the manufacture.

Support offerings:

OCZ does NOT support their drives once they go out of warranty. Although the warranty period is three years my OCZ 64 GB failed at just over four years, that is a long way from 1.5 Million hours! If your drive fails you will have to either find a SSD repair facility or buy another SSD. They do offer BIOS (firmware) updates for some of their drives.

Because of this I am giving OCZ a 4 out of 10 rating, if your drive fails after the warranty period you will not get it fixed by OCZ (who has the parts to fix your SSD) and the cost to fix a SSD is more than buying a new drive with the same capacity.

As with most cases of older products you do get "more bang for your buck" by not purchasing the latest and greatest.

Note: Why did I buy the 120 GB from OCZ after the problems with the 64 GB OCZ SSD? Because the failure was self induced (I defragged the drive - DO NOT defrag a SSD!) not a physical failure, I still think that OCZ's support is lacking but the physical materials in their products is very high. After six+ years the original four 32 GB SSD drives I have in laptops are still operational, three run 24/7 in servers.