Specifications, Pricing and Availability

Vector is OCZ's newest flagship SSD and uses an in-house controller made possible through the acquisitions of Indilinx and PLX assets. At the time of writing OCZ lists three capacity sizes - 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. We suspect Barefoot 3 can scale to at least 1TB with new 20nm 1GB die (eight 16GB die per NAND package) when it hits the market in 2013. OCZ hasn't mentioned a 1TB capacity size model, but that would be the logical progression and we're already seeing 20nm flash ship on some products. Vector uses 25nm IMFT synchronous flash now that was purchased in bulk and packaged by OCZ.

The 128GB model we're looking at today doesn't share the same performance specifications as the two larger models. The sequential read performance stays steady at 550MB/s across the board, but the sequential write speed moves to 400MB/s. The random read speed also shrinks to 90K IOPS, 10K lower than the two larger models.

Aside from the performance increases, Vector brings two new features to the table. The first is a new 7mm Z-height for many ultrabook designs. OCZ does have a Vertex 3 LP with the same 7mm Z-height, but Vertex 4 was never scaled to the smaller form factor. The second new accessory is a software inclusion for cloning an existing HDD/SSD. The software is called Acronis True Image and we've used it for years with great success.

Vector continues OCZ's new flagship warranty length of five years, a term first introduced on Vertex 4. The rest of the accessory package is OCZ standard, desktop adapter bracket, mounting screws, a sticker and a couple of paper docs.

As we stated in the introduction, we spent $161.98 ($1.99 added for faster shipping) at Newegg for our Vector 128GB and waited roughly four days for it to arrive after the purchase.