This had me puzzled aswell, the only thing I can see is that it shows as coming with a 3 year warranty on my suppliers site while the vertex doesn't specify a warranty period making me think it is 12 months (here at least, I am aware otehr countries have different rules over warranties for certain goods).
Other than that "it's newer so it costs more" seems to spring to mind
While I would guess a Sandforce controller would still have an edge?.. much of these improvements are done in the newest firmware. Google the drives features(and add some salt of course) to see what they have done to help with those concerns.
Not to mention that even the ones with supposedly horrible WA are still plugging along in many thousands of systems. Especially the older 10K PE/c drives with newer firmware.
They don't actually die completely as many think they do and can be d-flashed back to life quite eaily. I commonly beat the snot out of my Indy based drives whenever I have the opportunity and they are just as fast as day 1 of purchase.
Plus they were entry level drives anyways and I plan on just using until they die(beyond destructive flash recovery). Onwards and upwards, right?
Ignoring specific work loads that would utilize large sustained reads and writes, at what speed does the difference become imperceptible?
If the Octane is slightly slower but is rock solid stable
that is a big if for an untested drive with brand new firmware from the least reliable manufacturer.