 Welcome to another SSD unboxing. This one is actually particularly exciting. This is OCZ's Vertex 4. So if you're familiar with OCZ's nomenclature for their drives, you'll know that as far as the consumer space goes, Vertex is their branding for what they consider to be their top tier, best they can deliver, top product line. So the original Vertex used an Indolink's Barefoot controller and that was when OCZ and Indolink were both still separate companies. The second generation Vertex used the first generation SandForce controller which at the time delivered previously unheard of performance due to the way that it compressed the data before it wrote it to the flash allowing you to basically get more mileage for your dollar in terms of the actual speed of the flash itself due to controller voodoo magic. Then the Vertex 3 which is still a current product and still going is using a second generation SandForce controller, a C to 3 6 gigabit per second SandForce controller. And this right here is the second product we've seen from OCZ that takes advantage of their new relationship with Indolink. So that is the original Vertex one was Indolink's and now we've come full circle again back to Indolink's but the difference is this time OCZ is the owner of Indolink's has developed the controller for this chip in house since the acquisition for Indolink's and is so proud of their creation that they are putting their Vertex branding as well as a five year warranty behind this product. And I apologize guys in advance for the backdrop here which happens to be my system that I'm working on but it was too heavy to move so it is what it is. So what does OCZ have to say for themselves? High performance design? Yeah that's for sure. As far as real world performance benchmarks go, it's pretty much up there. It's either a top performer or the top performer. In some synthetic benchmarks it doesn't do quite as well but at the end of the day I use my drives in the real world. I don't know about you. MLC flash memory is hardly a selling point. Everyone's using MLC flash memory these days. Includes an SSD adapter, that's good to have. SATA 3 6 gigabit per second which is pretty much the limiting factor for the performance of this drive due to a couple of the performance enhancements they've made including a huge RAM cache that allows it to basically max out the SATA 3 6 gigabit per second interface whenever it's able to use it. Trim support? Once again it better be and a really cool thing about the fact that it has trim support is also compared to the Octane which was the first Indolink's infused OCZ product since the acquisition. Non trim support is also significantly better compared to that first generation Everest product. So this is Everest 2 in terms of the controller and it not only supports trim but also performs much better without trim. Indolink's infused so that means it has an Indolink's controller as opposed to the San Force controllers that not only OCZ has access to but everyone else and their dog has access to. This is their own thing so it was designed and built with unparalleled performance reliability and endurance in mind. So reliability and endurance is something that they're very very serious about on this product. Not only are they throwing the 5 year warranty on it but they're also building in a lot more advanced features such as and I totally have notes over there. No don't look over there. Those are my notes. Okay just a sec. So the features that OCZ is building in to justify that warranty are things like very low write amplification compared to previous generation products which means that when especially when the drive is in a more used state and it has to move things around before it can write to it it is doing less wasting of the I mean let's face it few limited write cycles that are available on the NAND flash that it's using so that's going to make it last longer. Also it's ready for upcoming generations of NAND flash because it supports much more robust error correction than previous generation products which allows it to as we shrink the processes for the NAND flash that's on these drives they become inherently less accurate and less reliable so we will be able to compensate for that with an advanced controller like this one which may not seem relevant today but if you're an engineer at OCZ or any other SSD company you had better be concerned about that especially if you're going to bring a product to market and expect it to last for a long time. Now speaking of lasting for a long time performance is very good today but I would definitely expect it to continue to improve because we are still very early on in the firmware of this drive and even the last generation everest product Octane got a significant performance boost with firmware well after the initial launch. So inside the box we get a my SSD is faster than your hard drive sticker we get an OCZ warranty and installation guide book. Sweet. Alright we get a two and a half inch to three and a half inch OCZ adapter made of metal which is good and we get some mounting screws and finally the vertex for 2.5 inch solid state drive and what could be what could be sexier than putting it next to this GTX 590 classified so you can enjoy both of them together. Pretty sweet hey. So consistent performance across all workloads is a trait that both everest controllers share. Now what that means is compared to Sanforce where if you're copying a large file that happens to be like a RAR file or a 7-zip file an already compressed file it will tend to be significantly slower because Sanforce derives a lot of its performance by compressing data on the fly and you can't really compress much further data that's already been compressed whereas everest gets the same performance regardless of whether you're working with compressible or non-compressible data. It supports AES 256 encryption which is a feature that is useful if you encrypt your drive personally I don't work with encryption on my desktop so I'm not too worried about it. It also has absolutely wicked 4k random read and write performance as well as outstanding write performance once again especially with incompressible data when it comes to incompressible data this drive is pretty much untouchable. The higher cap drives as with many other drives I don't know if you guys have checked out this video on my NCIXCOM channel but if you do I do mention this many times higher capacity drives tend to perform better than lower capacity versions using the same architecture whether it's because there are more channels to write to in parallel or read from in parallel giving it just a sheer bandwidth advantage or whether there are other architecture tweaks that just tends to be the case. So this is a 256 gig drive which will perform slightly less than the 512 gig drive and slightly better than the 128 gig drive so you do get more value for buying a higher capacity besides just the additional capacity and right now 120 gig is sort of the sweet spot but more and more people are deciding to go with 256 gig drives as well. So you can come in and have a close look at it physically although I don't expect you're going to notice much of note. The sticker is on crooked on this one so maybe that's because it's a media sample but you know that's probably the kind of thing that I would correct because I'm OCD like that. In terms of mounting holes you see your usual mounting holes so yes it can be mounted either in a desktop or in a notebook. You've got your four on the bottom, you've got your sticker showing the serial number, you've got your warranty void if removed OCD sticker, you've got your standard SATA 3 6 gigabit per second data port as well as your SATA power connector and other than that in terms of the physicality of it yeah there's nothing special but it's what's under the hood that makes this drive special. Maybe it's not the same kind of a generational performance leap like we saw from Vertex 1 to Vertex 2 or from 2 to 3 but what this is is it's finally something that OCD has 100% control over. I mean yeah there were the blue screen issues with the earlier SandForce drives that OCD took the brunt of the flak for because they were the ones shipping most of the drives. Well now they're no longer relying on a third party company in order to support them so this is one of the first products where we see how well they are going to deliver when they actually fully control all aspects of the execution of this drive so I'm very excited to see how the general public accepts this particular product. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.