OCZ Vector 150 Series Solid State Drives Tested

The new OCZ Vector 150 series drives look essentially identical to the original Vectors, save for the small “150” badge to the right of the name.

The OCZ Vector 150

Both the 120GB and 240GB drives shown here conform to the 2.5” form factor and have slim 7mm Z-Heights. The enclosures used on the drives are all metal and are clearly sturdier and heavier than most other consumer-class SSDs we’ve tested. There are really no external features to speak off other than a few decals and the standard SATA power and data connectors, but that’s par for the course.

 
Barefoot 3 Controller, Toshiba NAND, Micron DRAM

If you crack the drives, however, and you’ll see OCZ’s own Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller on board—the same controller used in the original Vector. That controller is paired to 19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives here sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB.

Note that these new Vector 150 drives have more spare NAND over provisioned than the original Vectors, which were built using 25nm NAND. Whereas the original drives launched in 128, 256, and 512GB capacities, these new drives land at 120, 240, and 480. That additional spare area is reserved for wear leveling and other proprietary features and aids the drives in achieving their higher endurance ratings.

There are 16 pieces of NAND in the 240GB drive (left), and 8 pieces in the 120GB drive (right).

OCZ’s Vector 150 drives are all rated for max read speeds of 550MB/s, but write performance varies between the models. The 120GB drive’s writes peak at 450MB/s; the 240GB and 480GB drives at 530MB/s. All of the drives support TRIM, 256-bit AES compliant encryption and they’re rated for 50GB/day host writes for 5 years, under typical client workloads. Idle power is listed at .55w. Active power at 2.5W.

OCZ also offers a 5 year warranty on the drives.