OCZ Vector 180 240GB and 480GB tested

Cons

• Relatively expensive
• Average performance

The 2.5″ SSD Vector 180 is the latest flagship of OCZ, now owned by Toshiba. OCZ has incorporated a combination of flash memory from parent company Toshiba and the in-house developed Indilinx Barefoot controller in its Vector 180. The Toshiba nand is MLC memory that is made according to the A19nm process, or second-generation 19nm-nand, and the controller is the Barefoot 3 M00, which is the same faster variant of that controller as in the Radeon R7 drives, Vertex 450 and Vector 150 was used.The M00 has ARM cores clocked at 397MHz, the M10 variant is clocked at 352MHz and is used in the Arc 100 and Vertex 460, among others.

The Vector 180 succeeds the Vector 150, but has some innovations. The most notable of these is the maximum capacity. With the Vector 150 that was 480GB, but the Vector 180 is also available with 960GB storage capacity. That’s thanks to the use of 128Gbit chips in that version, versus 64Gbit chips in the smaller capacities.

The used nand is also of a newer generation and OCZ has introduced its new Power Failure Management Plus, or PFM+, with the Vector 180. OCZ uses small capacitors to keep the mapping table intact in the event of a power failure. In addition, the table is preemptively periodically written to the nand. That table tells the controller where data is in the nand and is kept in the dram. If the power drops, the capacitors should supply enough current to write that table to the nand. So PFM+ is not intended to rescue all data that is in the dram cache; this would require more capacitors and that is also a function that is more aimed at enterprise SSDs. The PFM+ technique is therefore intended to prevent brickingof your SSD. Should that happen, the drive will be replaced under the five-year ShieldPlus warranty.

We tested the Vector 180 according to our standard solid state drive testing protocol, but show a subset of the results in this short review. The full test results can be viewed in our benchmark database. We compare the Vector 180 to its predecessor, the Vector 150, which features Toshiba’s first-generation 19nm nand. We also compare the most popular drives, such as the BX100 and MX100 from Crucial, and the 850 Evo from Samsung.

The sequential read and write speeds generally do not differ much with SSDs and are not very common in daily use anyway. Except for read speed, the Vector 180 drives are average to fast in the AS-SSD tests.

In the traces where all reads and writes to a system disk are recorded and played back, we see somewhat lower performance in the boot and gaming benchmarks than the other disks. The Vector drives score well in the other traces, with the larger 480GB version slightly better than the smaller.

Conclusion

As so often, the rock-hard performance differences between the various SATA SSDs are very minor. It is therefore not for nothing that SSDs have now been developed that should overcome the bottleneck of the SATA interface, as PCIe SSDs do. The most important criteria for SATA SSDs should therefore also apply to the Vector 180 SSDs: price and reliability. The Vector 180 drives are currently a lot more expensive than the competition, but they come with a five-year warranty. Moreover, with its PFM+ technology, OCZ promises to keep your data safe during power interruptions and to deliver good performance for a long time. However, it is highly questionable whether that outweighs the considerably higher price you have to pay.