![]() These are the first drives shipping with RC1 of the SF-1500 firmware and will presumably not die on you after a couple of weeks. This is the same controller from the Vertex 2 Pro in December, but with an updated firmware (RC1). OCZ apparently got a sweetheart deal on an early batch of SF-1500s. It's basically the Vertex 2 Pro with one big caveat - there are only a limited number of these drives being made - 5,000 to be exact. Here’s where the Vertex Limited Edition comes in:ĭespite its name, the Vertex Limited Edition is an MLC SandForce SF-1500 SSD (technically it's a SF-1200/SF-1500 hybrid like the Vertex 2 Pro, but that's a separate issue entirely). The consumer MLC SF-1500 based Vertex 2 Pro is gone forever. For enterprise customers OCZ will ship the Vertex 2 EX based on the SF-1500 with SLC flash and a ginormous, quarterly-budget depleting pricetag (to be determined). This SSD will carry a pricetag similar to present day Vertex drives, but hopefully offer better performance. ![]() Instead of the Vertex 2 Pro, OCZ will be shipping the regular Vertex 2 based on SandForce’s slower SF-1200 controller. I knew that it was going to be pricey at the time I wrote the article, but apparently OCZ thought it could bring the price down by the time it shipped. Not because of the issue that lead to the untimely death of my drive, but because the SF-1500 controller is just too expensive. Now the true difference between SSDs rears its head after months or years of use.”Īnd second, the OCZ Vertex 2 Pro as a product has been canned. They behaved like jerks when you tried to use them. The old JMicron drives were easy to cast aside. It’ll be a while before you can embrace any new product with confidence.Īnd it only gets more complicated from here on out. I hate that it has to be this way, but we live in the wild west of solid state storage. The bugs of course never appeared in my testing, but only in the field in the hands of paying customers. Even Intel managed to screw up two firmware releases and they do more in-house validation than any company I’ve ever worked with. It’s only after we collectively put these drives through hundreds and thousands of hours of real world usage that we can determine whether or not they’re sponge-worthy. “Ultimately, the task of putting these drives to the test falls on the heads of you all - the early adopters. It only took a couple of weeks worth of real world use to make it happen, but this is why I prefaced the preview with the following: Not to mention that the company who made the controller was shipping largely unproven technology with an unknown amount of reliability/validation testing.įirst, my SandForce SF-1500 pre-release sample straight up died on me. Unfortunately, it was pre-release hardware, with no known price and no set release date. The drive made an impressive showing, easily besting any other MLC SSD I’d ever tested. If you want to know how SSDs work, take a look at the SSD Relapse. If you want to know more about how it works, I'd suggest consulting my Vertex 2 Pro Preview. Not a bad tradeoff for a company trying to sell you expensive SSD controllers. As you may remember, the controller works in a radical way - by reducing the amount of data written to flash it improves performance and longevity, at the cost of controller/firmware complexity. Back in December I previewed OCZ’s Vertex 2 Pro, the first drive I’d tested to use SandForce’s SF-1500 controller.
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