OCZ Vector PCI Express SSD Benchmarks from CES

OCZ used the Consumer Electronics Show to unveil their latest high-end solid state drive, the Vector PCI Express. As its name suggests, the Vector PCI Express leverages the same in-house developed Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller technology used in OCZ’s excellent Vector SATA III SSD (reviewed here), but the new drive attaches to a system via PCI Express.

We posted news of OCZ’s initial announcement here, but have since been able to check it out in person and witness a few benchmark runs.

A quick visual inspection of the OCZ Vector PCI Express reveals a pair of Barefoot 3 controllers on board, along with a boatload Intel NAND and Micron SDRAM cache. There is also a removable heatsink assembly on the card that attaches to its retention bracket and is held in place by a pair of spring-loaded clips. We should also note that the heatsink used on the Vector PCI Express appears to be smaller than the heatsinks used on some of OCZ’s previous PCIe-based SSDs, so it may be easier to cool, but we haven’t had a chance to test that hypothesis just yet.

Like most other high-end, PCI Express Solid State Drives, the controllers and NAND on OCZ’s Vector PCI Express are setup in a striped RAID configuration to boost performance. As you can see in the image above, the drive achieves 1GB/s transfers in the ATTO Disk Benchmark with max 4K random IOPS just shy of 160K, according to IOMeter. A CrytsalDiskMark benchmark run showed 844.9MB/s reads and 904.7MB/s writes, but we were told those numbers are somewhat lower than expected. The pre-production drive we saw in action had been on display the whole day and been subjected to numerous benchmarks runs, which degraded performance somewhat.

Final pricing wasn’t available for the OCZ Vector PCI Express, but we were told it would likely be in-line with, or slightly more affordable than similar, previous-gen products. Expect a full review here on HotHardware in the coming weeks, as we get closer to the drive’s official release.