 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the OCC vector which has one of the cleanest shrink wraps I've ever seen. It's really hard to get a handle on this. I mean, maybe this is part of their whole restructuring they've gone through. I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to the stock news and all that kind of stuff, but OCC went through a huge restructuring, CEOs gone, replaced by another guy and they laid off a significant portion of their workforce with the idea being that they're going to get leaner and meaner and more focused on behaving like the very large company that they have now become. So the vector is the longest development cycle that we've ever seen from an OCC SSD. It took longer than 18 months to bring to market, which means that they were, I mean, think about that for a second. That means back when Vertex 3 was riding high, they were already working on this in addition to having Vertex 4 in the pipeline and this is the true next generation replacement to anything that we've seen over the last little while from OCC. This has just taken a very long time to bring to market. For context, previous OCC products have taken less than 12 months to actually bring them to the market. So they're much more focused on validation and compatibility and delivering a more consistent user experience. So what that means is this drive should be far and away the finest thing we've ever seen out of OCC, which is very, very exciting. I mean, remember something guys, OCC has taken a lot of flack over the years for issues with Indolink's controller drives, issues with San Force controller drives because their whole thing is they were always first to market with it. So all these OCC drives were out there and even though every other manufacturer had the same issues, OCC took a lot of the flack because they had more drives out there. So there were more people complaining about them. Whereas now they've decided we're going to take a completely different approach. We're not going to release this thing till it's completely ready. I haven't heard any complaints about the Vector yet. And in terms of performance, it is right up there with Samsung's new 840 Pro. I mean, think about that. I mean, back when OCC was saying, okay, yeah, we're going to be an SSD company, we were kind of looking at it going, okay, well, Intel was just dominating back then with the X25 series and you're kind of going, oh yeah, okay, let's see if these guys can go up against a juggernaut like Intel. Now Intel's kind of faded away. Now we were kind of saying, oh, you know, Samsung launched the 840, the 840 Pro, how are they going to go up against a juggernaut like that? Well, they figured out a way. So the Vector is very competitive with the 840 Pro series. It uses 25 nanometer NLC flash. So it's not using TLC flash like the 840, which causes it to have not very good write speeds compared to a flagship product that is using NLC flash. Remember, TLC means three bits per cell as opposed to two bits per cell, which is what we're seeing in the higher end drives. Right, right. The most exciting thing about this, it comes with a two and a half to three and a half inches. No, that's not the most exciting thing about it. This is also the first OCZ SSD. See this Indolink's infused thing here. So if you guys remember the original Indolink's Barefoot controller back in the Vertex and everyone else had access to that too. So that was the first generation Indolink's controller. Then Barefoot too never really seemed to come to life unless that's what they ended up branding the one in the Octane and the Vertex 4. So then finally there was another Indolink's controller that was actually not OCZ designed silicon. That was a Marvell controller that was then repurposed with an OCZ firmware. This is designed in house by the PLX team, the Indolink's team and another sort of segment of the team based out of OCZ's California headquarters. So it is designed from the ground up. It uses an ARM Cortex core and an Aragon co-processor, whatever that guy does. OCZ is not sort of giving out all of the details about how exactly that works, but it is completely actually designed by them, both hardware and firmware and then they're just finding a fab to manufacture the chips for them. I mean same thing goes for the flash itself. It's Intel flash, so OCZ doesn't actually manufacture the flash, but they're packaging it themselves so once you actually open up the drive, everything's OCZ in there. Comes with all the mounting options you'll need for your notebook. So there's your side mounts, there's your bottom mounts. Idle power consumption is a little bit higher than something like a Samsung 840 Pro, but at load they're very very close, which means that it's totally suitable for notebook use. However, I think most people still these days are buying these high performance SSDs for desktop use. It's warrantied for up to five years. Well yeah, up to five years, or I think it's something, some number of terabytes. I can't remember exactly how many terabytes, but they're warrantying it for 20 gigs per day for five years. So think about that for a minute. I mean just for fun, try to figure out how many gigs you write to your boot drive every day. I can pretty much guarantee you it's a lot less than 20 gigabytes, and then you know you go away for a week on vacation, maybe you don't use your computer every single day, now you've banked up some more. I've realistically if you don't get more than five years out of this drive, then I'll be very very surprised. In terms of performance, it's right up there with drives like the 840 Pro. Hangs with pretty much well, I mean the 840 Pro has been in a league of its own for a little while, so it hangs with that, which means it is a perfect choice for an enthusiast grade top tier SSD. It also provides very consistent performance, whether it's the fact that it has trim, which I mean any sort of modern SSD has, or whether it's you know how cluttered up the drive is or whatever else is going on with it, it responds very very consistently, which to me is what SSD is all about, because you can take a hard drive and you can go, okay yeah I'm going to write a sequential file or read a sequential file, oh yeah it's almost as fast as an SSD, hurr hurr hurr, it's not about that. It's about when things get rough, when things get fragmented on the actual drive itself, how well does it react when it has to rely mostly on its random performance and the vector performs very very well. So thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look, for those of you who need a summary, the most important things to take away are, true flagship performance drive, the first truly OCZ designed right down to the very heart and soul of the drive that we've seen yet, and five year warranty, so it's right up there with everything else like the Intel 520 series. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.