OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Max IOPS Edition SSD Review

OCZ Vertex 3 MI – Under The Hood

If you had a look at any of our other Vertex 3 reviews you would have seen that removing the backplate for the OCZ Vertex 3 MI 240 GB drive is as simple as taking out four small screws. As seen in the image above, there are also four screws that hold the PCB in place.

A little different layout here than the Vertex 3 120 GB or the Agility 3 240 GB drives. Rather than two rows for four side-by-side longways, the NAND on the Vertex 3 MI has three rows with their short sides adjacent and the third row having one less than the other two. Still, there are eight total on this side.

The MLC NAND on board is of Toshiba manufacture which is again different that the ‘regular’ Vertex 3 drives which have Intel NAND. Specifically, its part number is TH58TAG7D2FBAS9 which indicates that it’s 32nm toggle NAND which we’ve seen is very fast – rated at 133
megatransfers/second (MT/s) which is nearly triple that of most other NAND of the ONFI 1.0 variety. This is exactly what we saw on the Vertex 3 Pro drive. Sixteen modules at 16 GB in density results in 256 GB total capacity overall.

Flipping over the PCB we find the same configuration of the remaining NAND modules with the drive controller sitting in the its usual position.

That brings us to the seemingly ubiquitous SandForce branded controller. The SF-2200 is the latest generation controller that supports a SATA III interface and speeds that make platter hard drives seem to be the speed of pencil and paper. Supporting TRIM and featuring the DuraClass technology that handles wear leveling algorithms, error-correction and drive maintenance duties in addition to a number of other features such as data encryption and compression. The compression piece is what allows it to produce great numbers.