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OCZ Vertex Plus: Should I get one?

E

evilspoons

Senior member
I have the opportunity to (attempt) to buy an OCZ Vertex Plus 120 GB for $99. (Stock may be limited.)

Should I grab one of these to replace my 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 boot drive in my Windows 7 box? I have a Core i7 2600k on an Asus P8Z68-V PRO. I have a second hard drive with all my crap thrown on it so there's only about 65 GB of stuff on the boot drive.

I'm aware there are many faster SSDs out there but this seems to be the best $/GB I've ever seen on an SSD and OCZ makes some decent products. Mostly I'm worried about these things being flaky. I don't want to have to reinstall my system randomly one day because the drive decided to have a brain haemorrhage.

Any experiences out there?
 
I'm still happy with my OCZ Vertex 1. The new Plus model is even faster and at $100 it's a steal. It might be slower than newer SSDs, however only marginally so when it comes to desktop use.
 
Cheap and cheerful drive. Circa X25-M generation but less polished. For the money it's a good drive. You might want to check the OCZ forums in their Indilinx sections to see what issues people have had and all that. The Plus runs the Martini firmware on a Barefoot controller.

You will notice a huge difference in responsiveness using Windows compared to the Barracuda. For the prie you can get it for I think its worth it.
 
I got one because gift cards were expiring soon at newegg and this was like you said the best deal I've seen on an SSD.

Windows starts up super fast but honestly other than that its not much of a difference at all. All I do is play games and surf the web though so I didn't expect much.

If you have 100 bucks burning a hole in your pocket this drive (even at $110) is probably the best deal around for basic use. Its definitely not life changing like some people would like to tell you though.
 
I'm considering getting a 250 GB right now, as they are just about what i can afford, and about the same price as the 160 GB Intel 320 I originally had planned to get.

I would have prefered to get away with 90-120 GB for boot like most normal people, but there is a new programmer born every day that insist that their application and all its supporting files _must_ live in /Applications on OS X, and 10 years of trying to trick them with symlinks and sugar have tought me that's just gonna end in tears.
With a 120 GB bootdrive I would have to keep watching it to make sure the OS got room to do it's things. After all, the reason for harddrives is "so we won't have to delete stuff". (can i sell that slogan to WD?)

I don't think I'd notice significant difference in day to day use compared to the benchmarkwinners unless i start benching.

The stability of the drive is a concern, tho. But I'm not sure I should check OCZ forums as last time i did that it scared me off SSD's for a period of 6 months or so 🙂

Vertex Plus can be annoying to google btw. Any attemt to have Google respect that it's a string just fail in the most exasperating manner possible. It's almost looks like it's on purpose. Just as when you search "bananas" it will return "showing x results for ananas - did you mean to search bananas?". But this is straying off topic.

I'll give it a few minutes on Bing, and if nothing horrible about this drive surfaces, I'll go to checkout and live with my desicion as best i can 🙂
 
Puppies04 said:
And here is an example of a crucial M4 being just as horrible, plus you can search this thread for people complaining about bricked intel and corsair drives aswell, your post proves nothing other than your ignorance.

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-...What-is-Crucial-going-to-do/td-p/48952/page/2
Click to expand...
I could do the same and link to problems with the Intel 510 and 320, Crucial M4 and C300, and of course Sandforce based SSDs.

Some folks around here will jump on every opportunity they get to bash Sandforce, and especially OCZ. It's their favorite pastime.

The FACT is, although many don't want to believe it. There are problems also with P67/Z68/H67 SATA chipsets, and even more problems with power management on those boards.

It will all come out in the wash, most likely around the time that Intel launch their 520 SSD. 🙂
 
SO: as a follow-up to this thread.

I bought the Vertex Plus. I used it for about two weeks and then data started to randomly get corrupted. Windows File Protection freaking out, strange things like my sound not working despite the drivers being installed... turns out a DLL file that "connects" the Windows audio system to the sound card output went MIA.

Opened a support ticket with OCZ and they told me to do a Secure Erase and then reinstall Windows (never mind that I wanted to copy my old Windows installation). I did what they asked, and then about a week later it started to show signs of corrupted files again.

So... I brought it back to the store I bought it from. The guy at the desk was in a good mood (his shift was over ten minutes before I showed up) and he just gave me in-store credit vs. going through their regular testing process.

I bought an Intel SSD 320 and it's worked fine ever since. It's also noticeably faster, I don't know whether that's down to the Vertex Plus being broken or just an older design.

As an aside, during the process of switching to the Intel SSD I went back to my 1 TB hard drive boot disk... I hadn't really noticed any big speed differences when going to the SSD, but holy crap did it feel slow back on the hard drive. I guess an SSD just feels like the computer's working the way it ought to be instead of you waiting on some mechanical relic all the damn time.

TL;DR: the Vertex Plus sucked, I returned it and got an Intel SSD 320 that's faster and actually reliable.
 
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That sucks you got a bum drive. I've had 4 Vertex Plus drives in a raid array for about 2 years with no issues. I'm moving onto Sandforce drives and the first gen will be going in various computers I have scattered around the house. I've had good luck with OCZ drives so far.
 
There is a firmware flash to fix the corruption issue on the drives now. But to be honest, I'm a bit leery installing it in my own PC again.
 
Btw, these drives use the Indilinx Martini controller, which is better than the original Indilinx Barefoot by some way. See review here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4020/ocz-vertex-plus-preview-introducing-the-indilinx-martini/1

I'm planning on buying a 60GB version. My purpose would be to try this out with Intel SRT on my Z68 board.

It's a bit of a gamble, but opinions on the two week old firmware 3.50 seem pretty good. On this basis I'm going to give it a try. The price of this SSD is very good right now.
 
The problem with sandforce is, there instability problems where no known fix can be applied. If you are unlucky, you have to RMA the drive or secure erase.

Even OCZ has no idea what's wrong with the chipset, which is shocking.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...re-we-are-with-Vertex3-Agility3-Solid3-drives

With m4 or C300, fix is as simple as doing registry fix such as LPM states, windows power settings, etc. I owned both drives. My Sandforce is RMAed even after those changes and C300 never gave me any problem after doing those registry changes.
 
Comparing a (modern) $200 120gb SSD to one of the cheapest (and oldest) 120gb SSD's currently available really isn't a valid comparison? I don't think you'll find a single person that would claim that the Vertex is better than the Intel 320.

You could have also gotten a 128gb M4 for $170-$190 and it would have been better than the (much older) Vertex drive. The Vertex is a super budget drive and I'm sure it does fine for what it is.
 
Elfear said:
I've had 4 Vertex Plus drives in a raid array for about 2 years with no issues.
Click to expand...

I think you mean just Vertex?

The Vertex Plus was brand new when I bought it at the start of September 2011.

Binky said:
Comparing a (modern) $200 120gb SSD to one of the cheapest (and oldest) 120gb SSD's currently available really isn't a valid comparison? I don't think you'll find a single person that would claim that the Vertex is better than the Intel 320..
Click to expand...

Well, my reason for "comparing" them was that the Vertex Plus had the capacity I wanted at a significantly lower price point. I wasn't really looking for a specific SSD, just "a SSD in general" since I didn't have one. When the Vertex Plus blew up the next best thing that was in stock locally was something with the Sandforce BSOD bug (which is now apparently resolved, that would've changed my decision). After eliminating the buggy Sandforce drives, the next cheapest 120 GB drive in stock was the Intel SSD 320. It also turned out the 160 GB SSD 320 was on a much better GB/$ deal so I bought that instead.
 
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