OCZ Apex 120GB SSD

The drive

The Apex has a durable ABS housing with an aluminium bottom plate – OCZ themselves claims that the drive can withstand 1500G’s.

There are only the standard SATA power and data cable connectors at the rear. There are reference screw holes at the sides and the bottom of the chassis, adhering to 2.5" drive standards, so this device is fully compatible with any device using 2.5" SATA HDDs. Much like the earlier OCZ SSD drives there is a sticker with some basic electrical specifications regarding the drive, as well as the following warning:

"Warning: Delicate product. Sensitive parts inside. Damage may occur if shocked. Touching the circuits may cause malfunction. Removal of the cover will void any and all warranties."

The Apex series drives may not have an onboard cache but they feature an integrated JMicron JMB390 RAID chip in order to increase their performance above standard MLC SSD drives. In layman’s terms the Apex drives are essentially two SSD drives running on an internal RAID 0 configuration, which is largely increasing their performance over a typical drive with a single JMicron controller. Since our 120GB drive actually is two 60GB drives, there are two JMicron JMF602 second revision controllers driving the Samsung flash memory chips. The initial JMF602 controllers had a fair share of problems but these second revision chips are improved greatly, and with the integration of the RAID controller OCZ hopes to eliminate these problems completely.