14 DAY TRIAL // The 960 GB capacity is really popular among the solid state drives released at the 2015 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show. While some 1 TB units have also been launched, the majority of high-end models, 2.5-inch SATA or otherwise, come in 960 GB. OCZ's Vector 180 is included on that list.
Vector has always been a brand indicative of high performance and storage capacity when it comes to OCZ products, and this continues to be the case.
There is power in that sort of momentum after all, and OCZ has definitely been making good use of it, remaining a relevant, well-known brand on a marker that would otherwise have been choked by Samsung, Micron, Toshiba and the other huge corporations years ago.
Indeed, OCZ is a pretty big name now, and it's determined to stay that way, even without using the so very well-known and (arguably ) over-advertized SandForce controllers.
The OCZ Vector 180 SSDs
These solid state drives use the Barefoot 3 M100 controller, which was developed by Indilinx, a company OCZ bought back in 2011.
The chips used to have big discrepancies between maximum read and write speeds, but that's an issue that was fixed in the time since. Thus, the drives can achieve a top sustained read of 550 MB/s and a writing speed of 530 MB/s.
Meanwhile, the random performance is of 100,000 IOPS 4K random reads, with up to 95,000 IOPS 4K random writes – superior to most other drives in the world, actually.
IOPS means input/output operations per second and affects the usefulness of SSDs in big data applications like accounting, investment, mobile communications, etc. Not that OCZ was thinking of those situations in particular. The drives are consumer models, after all. Officially, anyway.
That said, the newcomers have power failure management and are made of Toshiba A19 MLC NAND flash chips, with 50 GB/day write endurance.
Availability and pricing
We know neither, since while the company did bring the 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB drives to CES 2015 and put them up there for everyone to see, it did not formally release them to retail yet. That means that we could have to wait between days and weeks for shipments to begin.
What we do know is that the units have a 5-year ShieldPlus warranty, owing to the power failure management features, among other things, which extend the lifespan. As for the price, we can still make an educated guess: probably 0.60 dollars per GB.
