OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD Review

Inside The Vertex SSD – Indilinix

Opening up any OCZ Vertex EX 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.

An Indilinx IDX110M00-LC ‘Barefoot’ controller is being used in the OCZ Vertex EX. This controller supports SSDs of up to 512GB in capacity and replaces the IDX110M00-FC chip found in OCZ’s Vertex multi-level cell (MLC) drives.

The Vertex has sixteen Samsung K9HCG08U5M-PCK0 Single-Layer Cell (SLC) flash chips.

The OCZ Vertex EX 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 EX 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.