 This does not come in a retail box, although it will for you. This is the OCZ Vertex 3. So this is a very very exciting product because it comes as a successor and as a worthy successor to the Vertex 2 which has pretty much dominated the SSD market for the past considerable amount of time. So with the Vertex 1, OCZ had competitors that were like competing controllers that were not Indolink's which was used by OCZ as well as a number of others at the time out on the market such as Intel where performance was not necessarily the strongest argument for getting a Vertex 1, especially later on in the lifecycle. With the Vertex 2, there hasn't been that much that's been close or beaded in terms of performance, but it was still a pretty close race. You had competitors like the Crucial C300 that were pretty close largely in part due to the fact that they used a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second control interface. So the Vertex 3 changes all that. It gives us a new SandForce controller. This is an SFF 2200 SandForce controller and it also upgrades the interface to SATA 3 6 gigabit per second. So the one I have here today is in an anti-static bag. Comes packed in a foam thing like this. The retail drives probably come with a two and a half to three and a half inch adapter, but this one is clearly a bit too early of a sample for such niceties to be included. The drive itself will come with Vertex 3 branding on the top of it, but you can clearly see here that this is just a plain black drive with a silver bottom. This is a 240 gig version, although the drive is available in 120 240 and 480 gig configurations. Now the 480 gig at the time of filming is not really a compelling value at just over $1,600 or maybe it's like $1,800 retail. It's very very high. It's far more than double the price of a 240, whereas a 240 is approximately double the price of a 120 and so it should be. And a 120 is approximately double the price of another 60 gig on the market plus a premium for the advanced controller that goes into this. So the Vertex 3 uses updated 25 nanometer flash. It uses as I mentioned before an SFF 2200 controller. It uses a SATA 3 interface. So if you want to come and have a closer look at the interface here, there's your SATA power and there's your SATA 3 interface which looks exactly like SATA 2 because all of the changes that have gone on are actually on this side of the interface rather than on the connector themselves. You've got all of your standard mounting holes, so you've got your sides here as well as your bottom mounting hole so that means you'll be able to mount this in pretty much any laptop as long as it doesn't take a very small 1.8 inch SSD or if it has non standard mounting which is very very rare. So pretty much will fit in any laptop and with an adapter it'll fit in pretty much any desktop. In terms of other changes, OCZ, well okay let's talk about things that aren't changes. So it still supports trim which means that if you're running the Windows 7 OS it will automatically clean up any deleted data and optimize it so that you're not going to experience any slowdown as the SSD gets into a what is called a used state. Okay so it does feature trim and it is also fully RAID capable. Now this is something that pretty much everyone puts on their SSD packaging and it's always been a little bit confusing to me but RAID capable, come look at the drive for a little bit, RAID capable basically just means SSDs perform extremely well in RAID which has been true since day one and will likely remain true. It uses MLC flash which is not as durable as SLC flash but should still be just fine for consumer level use and it has it as speaking of consumer level use it comes with a three-year warranty and it has a mean time between failure of 2 million hours. Okay so like we've seen with previous generations of SSDs the specs are actually slightly different for the different capacities. So the 240 gig has a max read of 550 megs, a max write of 520 megs per second and random write at 4 kilobytes this is aligned of 60,000 IOPS. The 120 gig is slightly slower writes at only 500 megabytes per second and the 480 gig is actually significantly slower with only 530 megabytes per second read, 450 megabytes per second write and random write 4k IOPS of only 40,000. So the IOPS are actually the same for the 120 and the 240 gig drive. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Vertex 3 240. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos. Can't wait to try this guy out.