Introduction

Few people realize how long OCZ keeps their products on e-tails shelves for. I'm sure several of our readers would be surprised to learn that you can hop online right now and find a first generate OCZ Vertex drive. The day I wrote this article, Newegg even had a first generation Vertex on their site with a Shell Shocker deal.

This isn't last year's tech, this is a drive from 2009! If your plan is to purchase an SSD today and slowly add drives in RAID as you need more capacity and performance you don't have to worry about OCZ pulling the carpet out from under you. Their products, even when considered end of life (EOL) are still floating around, new in the box and from reputable seller. We can't say that about every manufacture and I don't think we can really say that about any other manufacture now that we give it some thought.

As we all know, the OCZ Vertex 4 is out and quickly gaining performance due to firmware updates. Even at launch the Vertex 4 512GB was a very good performer, but the older Vertex 3 model is a very good drive that is not ready to die off just yet.

The OCZ Vertex 3, even though it's a grandfather in SSD age is still one of the best SSDs money can buy. The price is now less than half of what it was when released, something that will bring a smile to everyone's wallets. The largest capacity size, 480GB that we are looking at today has seen an incredible price decrease, even since we first looked at it during the Vertex 4 256GB and 512GB product launch a few months ago.

Let's take a look and see just where the Vertex 3 480GB stacks up with the latest and greatest offerings on the market today.