OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB SSD Sneak Peek

To say that there's a lot going on in the solid state drive market at the moment would be the understatement of the year. The SSD market is so hot right now, there is a seemingly never-ending stream of new or updated products, that outdo their predecessors in nearly every way.

Just this past week alone, we brought you a full review of Intel's second generation X25-M, based on 34nm flash memory, and a preview of the impressive OCZ Colossus, which should not only be fast but will eventually be offered with capacities as high as 1TB.

Today, we have another preview to share, this time of the OCZ Vertex Turbo Edition SSD. The original OCZ Vertex SSD was praised for its strong performance and competitive price point. And it remains a very popular product amongst enthusiasts today. OCZ saw fit, however, to update the Vertex with faster cache and proprietary firmware to improve performance even further.

  

 
OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB Solid State Drive

The drive you see pictured here is a 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SATA SSD. It uses the same 2.5" form factor as most other SSDs currently available and is housed in a durable metal enclosure. The OCZ Vertex Turbo is built around an Indilinx controller, paired with 64MB of 180MHz DRAM cache--the original Vertex drives had 166MHz cache.


     
Preliminary Performance: HDTach and ATTO Disk Benchmark

The faster cache has gone a long way to increasing the drives performance. If you look at the original Vertex drive's performance in HD Tach in this round-up, you'll see that not only are write speeds significantly improved on the Turbo Edition drive shown here, but the consistency of the writes across the drive are smoother as well. The ATTO benchmark also shows consistent performance, with very similar read and write speeds once the transfer size hits the 64K mark.

We'll have a full review of the OCZ Vertex Turbo Edition SSD in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the full scoop.