OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120GB Solid State Drive Review

The Vertex 3 has always been a favourite of ours, due to the internals used, SandForce controller and the sheer performance that the drive offers. The Max IOPS offers the same blistering fast performance, but with a difference.

Due to the fact of the Max IOPS utilising Toshiba Toggle Flash NAND meaning it is better capable of handling huge loads of stacked writes. Whilst a 120GB Solid State Drive won’t see you utilising this feature day in/day out, it’s always a nice benefit to have, as and when SSDs get larger in capacity, but by then we may see an even better, improved controller and slightly quicker NAND memory.

Within AS SSD, we saw a real strong result in terms of the read speed, but when looking at the write performance, it performs slightly under par compared to the original Vertex 3. We do find that in real-world testing, such as PC Mark Vantage, that this drive was especially strong, across the range of tests, seeing Windows Media Centre topping over 400MB/s which we’ve very rarely seen before.

The performance does clearly show that in the real-world, the Max IOPS is certainly the best on the market from OCZ’s SandForce drive lineup, and nothing can touch it in terms of its lightning fast speed, especially in the real-world, which let’s face it, that’s where it matters the most, isn’t it?

Being based around the SandForce controller, reliability and performance is at an all-time high, and that’s why we see more and more SSD manufacturer’s following suit and going down the SandForce route, just like we’ve seen from OCZ, as we’ve proved today, it really does yield great results and amazing performance.

This does all come at a price, and at £186.14, it’s not the cheapest in the pack, but from OCZ, it’s certainly the flagship for SandForce driven SATA III based drives, with only the PCI-Express based SSDs offering better performance, but that’s a completely different price bracket in its own right.

The Vertex 3 Max IOPS is not a drive for the faint hearted, and people on a budget may opt for the cheaper Agility 3 based drives, but with anything, if you want the best, then you must be prepared to pay for it, and that’s exactly what we saw today, though we do feel that a lot of consumers may miss the point of this drive and just opt for the similar, but cheaper priced standard Vertex 3, but please remember that whilst the Vertex 3 is cheaper and still offers great performance, the Max IOPS offers more stable performance through the entire spectrum of data transfer, meaning that it won’t drop in performance like other drives will, and will continue to maintain a constant data throughput, and that’s the whole point behind this drive.