OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Solid State Drive Review

A Closer Look

On the outside, bar the name change and image redesign, the Vertex 460 is identical to its older sibling. A full frame sticker on the front of the drive adds a bit of style to the drive with rounded corners and a 7mm slim build.

Opening up the drive and taking a peek inside, the PCB is secured into the front half of the case with a thin metal lid sitting on top. A small heatpad on the lid allows for a good thermal contact to the Indlinx controller.

On the upper surface of the PCB, the 460 has eight Toshiba 19nm MCL NAND packages, along with another eight on the other side of the board. Alongside these is space for two DRAM packages, one of which is reserved for higher capacity models, with the drive controller resting in the middle.

The Indlinx BareFoot 3 M10 controller as found on the 450 is a recent acquisition by OCZ and under the new ownership, OCZ have been able to tweak and tune the controller to just the right sweet spot to optimise the drives performance.

The biggest change to the 460 as we know is the NAND and now is time to get a good look at these packages as we are certainly going to be seeing more of them, although we have seen them before on the Vector 150. Each TH58TEG7DDJBA4C 19nm package packs 16GB of storage and paired with the BF3 M10 controller OCZ rate the drive for 545MB/s read, 525MB/s write with IOPs figures of up to 95k.

As far as a cache goes, two Micron 256MB D9LGK 133MHz packages work together to give a total of 512MB to the controller.

With the additional eight MLC NAND packages on the underside of the board in place, the Vertex 460 has a total RAW capacity of 256GB, although over the Vertex 450, there is a 14% over provisioning, leaving 240GB on hand to play around with.