Introduction

OCZ Technology is the Swiss Army of solid state drives. The company has a product in their line-up for every occasion. Until now desktop users have been forced to pay a premium for smaller 2.5" notebook drives that need a desktop adapter bracket. Notebook drives require larger flash modules and need an adapter to fit in desktops. These premium parts raise the cost of the SSD whether you need them or not.

Keeping with the overall strategy of a product for every use (like a Swiss Army Knife), OCZ now has a desktop specific SSD that uses less dense flash and a native 3.5" form factor enclosure. The new 3.5" design is available in both Agility 2 and Vertex 2 programming with the latter having a higher IOPS. At the time of writing the 3.5" models cost the same as their notebook cousins, but this should change over time since the 3.5" drives should cost less to produce.

Today we will take a look at the OCZ Vertex 2 3.5" 120GB desktop solid state drive. On the surface the new drive appears to be just a larger Vertex 2, but internally the design is fresh and we should see a different performance profile. Let's move on and see what is different.