OCZ Vertex 460 SSD Review (240GB) – Great Performance At An Awesome Price!

January was quite eventful for OCZ; first finalizing their acquisition by Toshiba, going through a name change to OCZ Storage Solutions and even better yet, releasing their new Vertex 460 SSD. It is quite commendable to persevere through their acquisition, and still be able to produce a drive that is of high quality. Yes, that may be due to new partnerships and some additional assistance, but it is still impressive.

OCZ VERTEX 460 SSD (240GB) OVERVIEW

The OCZ Vertex 460 SSD is the newest OCZ drive to be released, and is great way to start off 2014. OCZ has specified that the Vertex 460 can have sequential read speeds up to 545MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 525MB/s.

The OCZ Vertex 460 should be available in storage capacities of 120, 240, and 480GB, with the MSRP looking to be $99.99, $189.99 and $359.99 respectively. This turns out to be a very low price for a solid state drive, costing approximately $0.75 per GB.

To go along with this great price, the Vertex 460 is accompanied by a 3.5″ desktop adapter, three years of limited warranty, as well as Acronis True Image cloning software so that you can easily clone your operating system and files from your old drive onto the Vertex 460.

OCZ VERTEX 460 COMPONENTS

Taking the Vertex 460 apart is very easy, but not advised. With the removal of four screws on the bottom of the SSD, you can remove the base plate and see the components of the drive.

First off, we can see the drive’s controller, surrounded by eight NAND memory modules, and a Micron DRAM cache memory package near the SATA 3 connector.

Immediately, we are directed to the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller, directly in the middle of the PCB. As a quick refresher, the controller is essentially the brain of the solid state drive that controls the read and write operations of the drive.

As we look in more detail at the PCB, we can also see that there are 16 Toshiba NAND flash memory modules, that would account for 16 GB of storage each. The NAND modules are labeled with the model number TH58TEG7DDJBA4C, which we have seen in previous versions of OCZ SSD’s. There are also two Micron DRAM packages, one found on either side of the PCB.