Overall and FV
When it comes to SSD’s it can be extremely confusing for all but the most knowledgeable enthusiasts. Back in the day people would look at a hard drive read and write speeds and from there you had a good idea of how it would perform. Hell, for that matter, you could tell how fast a drive would be just by reading its spindle speed. These days with SSD’s there isn’t any one thing to look at to be able to judge a drives performance, at least nothing as simple as spindle speed. Because of that, it’s actually very helpful that OCZ has their performance levels with the Agility and the Vertex. If someone were to look at the performance difference between the Vertex 3 and 4 for example, you would only see a 10 MB/s jump. Where the Vertex 4 really shines is in its high queue depth testing and IOPS. These numbers paint a different story. A story that has you getting the best possible performance everyday, not just when you are transferring a single file.
At the end of the day I am very happy with the Vertex 4’s performance. We put it up against a few of the fastest drives on the market and even though it didn’t top the charts in every single benchmark, it did when it counts. Because of that this would be at the top of my recommendation list, at least until someone comes out with something else that will outperform it. And with it listed at just over $200 currently at this capacity, I don’t think you can really go wrong with that. I wouldn’t let it stop me from picking up the Vertex 4 , but in the interest of being complete I should we did see a few drive failures when reading consumer reviews posted online. Every drive will have some failures, but before you buy take a look at the most recent reviews to make sure it’s not a trend. Our drive performed flawlessly in all of our testing though.