Overall and Final Verdict
Aesthetically the OCZ drives are by far the best looking drives that I have ever had in. The rounded aluminum shell looks great and is extremely strong. I really think the Vector 150 or any of the OCZ drives would look great in nearly any build. Of course looks are really only a side note when it comes to SSDs, performance is key. As with the last few OCZ drives I have tested, the Barefoot 3 controller performed great. The switch to the new NAND did mean a slight drop in performance over the previous Vector in most of our benchmarks though. It’s important to note that even though this drive didn’t beat the original Vector and the Vertex 450 in most of our testing, the smaller capacity does play a role in that as well. Generally higher capacities have a little better performance. I would be willing to bet that if you went with a larger size the performance difference would be much smaller.
When it comes to pricing, $95 isn’t a bad price for the Vector 150 at a 120GB capacity. A quick look around at other 120GB drives shows other drives like the Samsung 840 EVO and even the OCZ Vertex 460 come in a little cheaper. Because of that I can’t really put the drives price in the good or bad column, although it does lean towards the bad side. OCZ does add a little extra value to their drives by including a full copy of Acronis True Image along with the drive. Not only does this make it easy to copy your data over to your new SSD, you save yourself $40 if you had planned on picking the software up.
Where the Vector 150 really does stand out compared to the original Vector is its warranty. At 5 years you can expect the drive to last at least longer than the average useful life of your PC. Even with such a great warranty there are still going to be a lot of people a little hesitant to jump on the OCZ bandwagon with the company’s rocky history. People who picked up OCZ drives before the bankruptcy and Toshiba buyout were left without anything to fall back on. With Toshiba behind things now I do feel that they are more stable and less likely to run into similar issues in the future though. All in all the Vector 150 is still a great drive and I would still seriously consider going that route assuming the price was right.