OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Solid State Drive Review

The new OCZ Vertex 460 series drives look essentially identical to the Vertex 450 drives that came before, save for the small “460” badge to the right of the name and the coloring on the decal.

It Looks Like OCZ Went With HotHardware's Color Scheme On This One...

The 240GB drives shown here conforms to the 2.5” form factor (as do all of the other drivers in the family) and is has a slim 7mm Z-Height. The enclosures used on the drive is all metal and is clearly sturdier and heavier than most other consumer-class SSDs we’ve tested. There are really no external features to speak of, other than a few decals and the standard SATA power and data connectors, but that’s par for the course with most SSDs.

Open up the drive, however, and you’ll see OCZ’s own Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller on board—the same controller used in the older Vertex 450 series. That controller is paired to 19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB.

Note that these new Vertex 460 drives have more spare NAND over-provisioned than the original Vertex 450 drives, which were built using 20nm NAND. Whereas the original drives launched in 128, 256, and 512GB capacities, these new drives land at 120, 240, and 480GB. That additional spare area is reserved for wear leveling and other proprietary features and aids the drives in achieving their higher endurance ratings.

OCZ’s Vertex 460 drives are rated for max read speeds of 530MB/s (120GB), 540MB/s (240GB) and 545MB/s (480GB), and write performance varies between models as well. The 120GB drive’s writes peak at 420MB/s; the 240GB and 480GB drives peak at 525MB/s. All of the drives support TRIM, 256-bit AES compliant encryption and they’re rated for 20GB/day host writes for 3 years, under typical client workloads. Idle power is listed at .6w and active power at 2.7W, which is slightly higher than some previous SSD products.

OCZ also offers a 3 year warranty on the drives.