Specifications, Pricing and Availability

With only two capacity sizes and a higher price, the Max IOPS version of the Vertex 3 was never a wildly popular drive. As the benchmarks will show, the Max IOPS is one of the better SandForce SF-2281 based drives, even by today's standards. The drive managed to take advantage of newer firmware coming from SandForce and with each release the Max IOPS increased performance and reliability.

OCZ hasn't updated their Max IOPS spec sheet in quite a while even though new firmware has increased performance almost across the board. The quoted performance numbers for the 120GB model were looking at today is 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write speeds. We should be able to push past that performance easily today. The Max IOPS was the first SandForce SF-2281 drive to ship with a maximum 4K Random Write spec of 85,000 IOPS. Firmware updates allowed other Team SandForce manufacturers to make the same claims, but we'll let the benchmarks today speak for the performance.

At the time of writing the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120GB cost roughly $185 in the US. We used Google's Product Shopping feature to track down the best price online.

The drive receives a standard three year warranty and ships with a desktop adapter bracket, mounting screws, paper manual and a sticker.