I have been a fan of the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS series for a long time. Ever since I got my 120 GB Vertex 3 MAX IOPS last year, I have been impressed by the overall performance of the drive. In addition to the OCZ, I had a Corsair Force 3 120 as a data drive in my system. When I outgrew my Force 3, I needed to find something with more capacity and with better performance. I looked around at the deals and decided to buy a Corsair Force 3 GT 180 Gig which I got on sale. Unfortunately, when I plugged it into my system to clone it, I could not get files copied to it. It refused to clone any of the files actually caused Acronis to crash. In addition, the system became generally unstable. I checked that all the firmware was updated and everything was connected correctly and even tried different controllers, but in the end I could not get the drive to cooperate. Rather than continuing to mess with it, I decided to RMA the drive and look for something else. With the recent issues I had with Corsair memory, and now with this drive, I opted to look for a different MFG as I have lost the confidence I once had. What had attracted me to the GT was the pricing and the promise of roughly the same performance as the MAX IOPS. When I looked around at other drives that where equal to or larger than the Force 3, I really could not find anything that was interesting to me. All the fast 180-240 drives are fairly expensive, so if I was going to be forced to spend that much, I might as well go ahead and spend a little bit extra money and get the big brother of the drive that really impressed me all along, the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240 Gig.

As soon as I got the drive and plugged it in, the cloning process worked flawlessly. The cloning process using Acronis True Image 2012 completed in about 5-6 minutes. The experience could not have been easier and I had the system back up and running in less than 10 minutes including mounting the drive. Of course the performance of the Vertex 3 MI doesn’t disappoint. Below are the benchmarks of the original 120G I have had in the system for a while, as well as the new 240G for comparison. As you can see they’re both virtually identical (which is good thing). I have been, and probably always will be a fan of the OCZ Vertex series, especially the MAX IOPS, as it is without a doubt the fastest drive I have ever ran. I realize they are a bit more money, but when you consider they use the better memory chips with double the write cycles, and of course the unrivaled performance, it is actually not a bad value. I am very happy that I spent a little bit extra and got a drive that will not only last longer, but is just brutally fast.

 

P1020085

Vertex 3 MAX IOPs 120G

Vertex 3 120 MAXIOPS

Vertex 3 MAX IOPs 240G

 

Vertex 3 240 MAX IOPS