OCZ Vertex 120GB v1.10 MLC SSD Review

Inside The Vertex SSD – Indilinix

Opening up any OCZ Vertex Solid State drive will void your warranty, so we opened ours up so you don’t have to. After breaking the warranty seal and removing the four screws the cover comes off and you can easily see the controller and all the other goodies that make this SSD operate.

Taking a closer look into this 120GB Vertex SSD we find the Indilinx controller. Indilinx is a fabless Korean semiconductor company that specializes in SSD controllers. This 90nm SATA 2.0 Barefoot controller was announced back in August 2008, but in recent months just came to market. It is rumored to be much better than the JMicron JMF602 controller that has gotten such a bad reputation over the past several months.

The Vertex has sixteen Samsung K9HCG08U1M-PCB0 Multi-Layer Cell (MLC) flash chips. Since this is a multi-layer drive you can see that each IC is actually composed of a pair of IC’s that sit directly atop another.

The OCZ Vertex has a 64MB cache and that is handled by the Elpida memory IC pictured above. The Elpida 64MB SDRAM module is marked with S51321CBH-6DTT-F, but the actual Elpida part number is EDS51321CBH, which is a 133MHz (CL3-3-3) mobile RAM component. This 64MB cache buffer helps improve small write-to performance and removes the ‘stuttering’ effect that drives with less cache and different controllers are often faced with.

Pictured above you can see the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD (Left) sitting next to the Corsair P256 SSD (Right). As you can see the P256 has a completely different design as it uses a Samsung S3C29RBB01-YK40 controller and different components.