OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Capacity

When it comes to storage capacity the OCZ Vertex SSD has a free
capacity of 119GB as shown above. This should be enough for many
consumers and in the server and enterprise environments many of these
will be run in RAID arrays.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The OCZ Vertex EX 120GB SLC SSD was by far one of the fastest SSDs that we have ever benchmarked here at Legit Reviews. At the start of testing it was on its way to the Editor’s Choice award, but by the end of testing the drive degradation was obvious and impacting the benchmarks before we could even finish testing the drive. If we were able to run TRIM or the Wiper 0525 we would be able to restore the drives performance, but right now firmware version 1.11 (v1.10 for the 60GB Vertex EX) doesn’t support either of these functions.

6/17/2009 Update: The OCZ Vertex EX series has received a firmware update since this article was posted and it does now support Wiper.exe! To read more about firmware update 1.20 please refer to this small update after reading this detailed review.

Internally, OCZ has been testing and using firmware version 1.20, which supports these features. The engineers have told use to wait for this firmware, but they would not release it early for Legit Reviews to use for benchmarking purposes. The management over at OCZ pushed us to release this article with the current firmware as they were not certain when the new firmware would be ready. We put off this review for more than two weeks, while we waited for the new firmware and it still hasn’t arrived. When it does arrive it requires a ‘Full’ flash meaning that you will lose all the data on the drive, but the performance is said to be better and it will be able to run Wiper 0525 to help restore performance. As for the degraded performance on the drive, OCZ had this to say today.

“You need to run wiper 0525, you can’t do that unless you are running FW1.20, you are probably running 1.10 or 1.11 depending if the drive is a 120 or 60GB model.

As soon as OCZ say i can upload 1.20 i will upload it and make it available.

Regarding do benchmarks degrade MLC and SLC drive performance…sure they do.

Regarding do benchmarks shorten MLC and SLC drive life…sure they do.

Why? because you are hammering the drive in a way it was not designed to run, no OS runs like a benchmark does.

This is why we have threads explaining the more you bench a drive the more wear you are applying to the drive…even SLC drives slow down and take wear.” – OCZ PR on 6-15-2009

The OCZ Vertex EX SLC-based SSD will be excellent drives once the new firmware is released, but for now it’s hard for us to get excited about them when the drive we reviewed cost $1299.99 and the performance dropped down to the same write levels seen on the $140.99 Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB notebook hard drive. We will be posting an update once OCZ releases firmware 1.20 and we can take a quick look at the performance again.

Legit Bottom Line: The OCZ Vertex EX OCZSSD2-1VTXEX120G 2.5 inch SATA II SSD is no joke, but needs a firmware update to keep the performance numbers where we want to see them.