OCZ Vertex TURBO 120GB Solid State Drive

Packaging & Appearance
 
The packaging of the Vertex Turbo is near identical to that of other OCZ solid state drives being that it has a shrink-wrapped thin card exterior. The main difference is the Turbo emblem signifying that this is the enhanced version of OCZ’s killer Vertex SSD. The main features of the drive are displayed on the rear of the package along with a brief, concise run down of the specifications. I’m still amazed at the weight of the SSD’s which are much lighter than your average mobile phone.
 
rear
 
The interior packaging is also a standard affair with the foam padded box opening up to reveal the anti-static wrapped SSD itself. A token instruction leaflet is also supplied but in all honesty it offers little information of any real benefit. As with previous drives, I would prefer information on how best to ‘tweak’ an operating system to take maximum advantage of SSD technology.
 
package
 
The black coated metal casing has a mirror of the packaging design on a sticker which is placed upon the top of the drive. Because of the inherent design of SSD’s. these things are virtually indestructible. That isn’t to say you couldn’t break one but you would have to be extremely unlucky to do so accidently. We are yet to see any cases that house the SSD without an additional bracket so it is a shame that a premium product such as the Vertex Turbo does not include such a device. The drive should not however present any issues being fitted to a notebook 2.5″ drive bay thanks to the drilled and tapped screw holes. The rear of the SSD is bare metal and has a further sticker informing the user of handling procedures and that the interior houses static sensitive components and that the cover should not be removed…..
 
front rear
 
Of course we do not intend to follow those warnings (but you would do well to) and instead removed the backplate of the SSD via the removal of 4 tiny screws. The mainboard is very similar to that of the standard Vertex SSD however there are a few subtle differences.
 
inner top inner rear
 
Like the Vertex, there are two banks of 8 NAND Samsung K9HCG08U1M-PCB00 integrated chips. Because of the orientation of the 48pin NAND chips, each bank is multi -layered producing 64GBx2 (128GB). As we have previously seen, these Samsung chips fly when linked to the Indilinx controller. So far so good then…
 
 
SATA Samsung
 
The Vertex Turbo also uses the Indilinx IDX110 Barefoot controller seen in both the standard Vertex and GSkill Falcon, our previous top performing drives. The major difference however between those drives and the Vertex Turbo is with the 64MB of DRAM cache. While all of these drives use 64mb courtesy of Elpida, OCZ have ‘overclocked’ this ram to 133MHz (CL3-3-3). This tweak should further enhance the Vertex Turbos capability of writing small files.
Indilinx Elpida
 
I think we have shown there to be very few differences between the Vertex and the newer Vertex Turbo we see here today. Indeed cosmetically, the two drives are near identical save for the stickers. Even to the uninitiated, the interior would appear to be identical but the change in Samsung NAND flash IC’s, and overclocked Elpida DRAM cache may well see an improvment over the standard Vertex. 
 
Before we crack on with the benchmarking phase of the review, let’s take a look at the setup I will be using to test the OCZ Vertex Turbo and run a few familiar benchmarks which you may have used yourself….