OCZ Vector Solid State Drive Review

Despite their recent restructuring there is no doubt that OCZ have, for some time, been a market leader in SSDs. It was 2008 that they entered the SSD market and since then we have seen numerous generations of products from them in terms of traditional SSDs as well as a few more unique products such as the Enyo USB 3.0 SSD, RevoDrive Series of PCIe devices and RevoDrive Hybrid which looked to provide a mix of SSD performance and traditional drive capacity. While all that was going on OCZ were also acquiring some key players in the industry such as PLX Technology and Indilinx.

Earlier this year we saw OCZ release the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 SSDs, a mix of Marvel and Indilinx inside they offered some impressive performance along with OCZs decent software suite and excellent support. Today sees the first product to market which combines the Indilinx and PLX teams knowhow. The Vector series of SSDs is, other than NAND flash, a 100% in house design and we will be putting it up against the best drives currently available from Samsung, Intel and OCZ themselves.

OCZ use a familiar looking design for their latest SSD box. We get a decent image of the drive along with some key specification info and the box is as compact as possible which is always appreciated. Inside the drive is wrapped in an anti-static bag, suspended in foam and bundled with it is a case sticker, drive bay convertor (with screws) and product documentation. This documentation is primarily about the bundled Acronis software which allows us to quickly and easily move our operating system from an existing drive to the new OCZ drive.




A screenshot of Acronis is shown above, it is a nice simple application designed to make moving from our old drive to new (although Windows 8 is not supported) and this is backed up by the OCZ Toolbox. Through that application we can check the status of our drive, wipe it with Secure Erase to return to a fresh state or update the drive firmware for fixes and performance enhancements.

NOTE: OCZ plan to provide an updated version of Acronis when support for Win 8 has been added.