OCZ Vertex 450 Solid State Drive Review

Performance Summary: There’s no question that OCZ has a really nice drive on its hands with the 256GB Vertex 450 SSD. In most of our benchmark tests, it either beat the competition or hung close to the top two or three drives. Regardless, the Vertex 450 showed solid consistency and great bandwidth across all workloads. Of particular note is the remarkable improvement over the previous-gen Vertex 4 in terms of write speeds, which rival or exceed the SandForce-based SSDs in our test bank. And unlike SandForce SSDs, the Indilinx-based Vertex 450 didn’t have any issues with compression-related performance penalties.

The OCZ Vertex 450 SSD

Generationally, the Vertex 450 seems to mostly fit the profile of the original Vertex 3--consistent and high-performance.  OCZ should be relieved to see its homegrown SSD faring so well versus some of the market's top competitors. However, for as solid a drive as the Vertex 450 is, it doesn't always outshine the competition in every test--there are even one or two in which the Vertex 4 actually does better.

Further, although the cost of the Vertex 450 isn’t unreasonable, prices for other drives in our test suite have dropped considerably as well. Thus, at an MSRP of $234.99, the 256GB Vertex 450 with a formatted capacity of 238GB will run you $0.99 per GiB. That’s certainly respectable, especially granting that this is a new SSD and hasn’t enjoyed any price drops yet. Note, for example, that the 256GB Vertex 4 debuted at $349 before dropping to $203 just five or so months later. (For what it’s worth, the 128GB and 512GB Vertex 450s will cost $129.99 and $499.99, respectively.)

All things taken into consideration, we’re giving the Vertex 450 our Recommended badge for now, but we’ll look forward to seeing how things look in a few months when the price settles down a bit and OCZ perhaps delivers a firmware update or two to further tweak performance, which the company is wont to do. All in all though, the Vertex 450 looks very good.

Solid, consistent performance Good write performance 3-year warranty 7mm Z-Height	Price per GiB is a little high currently