OCZ Vector 180 480GB in Four-Disk RAID Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The OCZ Vector 180 hasn’t been on the market that long yet and the availability hasn’t spread as far as I’d liked to see it, but I’m sure that’s just a matter of time. The drives also did great in this RAID review and you can pick up your own for $269.99 at Amazon or £246.99 at Amazon UK. NewEgg also has the drive for $274.99 and German readers can find the cheapest via Geizhals where it starts at €276.22 at the time of writing.

Conclusion

The Vector 180 is OCZ’s new enthusiast and performance drive and it certainly lives up to that. The performance convinced just as much in this RAID review as it did in the single drive tests we did a little while ago. What RAID setup you should choose comes down to whether you need redundancy, speed, or a mixture of both. Depending on the setup, we saw linear read speeds close to 1700MB/s and a random 4K  performance up to 175K reading and 140K writing. Great results!

The physical part of the drive follows OCZ usual drive design with two simple stickers. The top one will show the company and series name and come in the series colour, in this case black. The sticker on the bottom contains all the relevant information such as serial numbers, firmware revision and product numbers, just like it should be. Everything at one glance when you need it and otherwise hidden away from the field of view in display-built systems.

OCZ is part of Toshiba now and as such this drive is a complete in-house creation. It’s using OCZ’s Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD controller and it is paired with Toshiba’s A19nm NAND chips for superb performance and reliability. The combination will not only give you a great performing drive, but also one that will last for a long time and one that comes with almost any feature that you could want, such as S.M.A.R.T., Trim, Garbage collection, and also the new Power Failure Management Plus protection. A feature like the PFM+ is rarely found in consumer drives and it helps to flush data from the cache to the NAND in case of a sudden power failure.

The Vector 180 doesn’t just perform great with fast transfer speeds and speedy throughput, it also comes with a 50GB per day endurance rating and is backed by OCZ’s 5-year ShieldPlus Warranty. You also get a good bundle with the drive that includes both a 3.5-inch adapter and a copy of Acronis True Image disk cloning software.

Pros

• Great speeds and endurance, also in RAID
• 3.5-inch adapter & Acronis True Image included
• 5-year ShieldPlus Warranty
• Good price

Cons

• Getting four of these drives might be too costly for some

“The OCZ Vector 180 480GB is one I’d love to have four of in a RAID setup. This is a kinda of performance that’s hard to ignore and the drives come with great features and endurance.”

Thanks to OCZ for providing us with these samples.