OCZ Summit

OCZ Summit SSD (120GB)

A few months ago, OCZ made a huge splash with its Vertex drive, which was the first solid state drive we'd tested that offers high-end read and write performance at a price that’s affordable for users looking to upgrade. The reason for the Vertex’s success is its controller chip, the Indilinx Barefoot. Since the Vertex, a host of other Indilinx-based drives from vendors such as RunCore and Patriot have hit the market, offering similarly strong performance. OCZ has released into the fray the similarly-priced Summit Series SSD, which also promises high-speed performance, but uses a Samsung controller instead. Our tests reveal that the $350 Summit is a compelling, competitively-priced choice for SSD upgraders, as it runs neck-and-neck with the Vertex on most tests. The OCZ Summit comes in a standard 2.5-inch form factor, and uses a standard SATA interface. Most notebooks made in the past couple of years support drives of this size and come with SATA ports. However, some ultraportable and thin-and-light systems such as the Lenovo ThinkPad T400s use 1.8-inch drives instead. Before you upgrade, be sure to check your notebook’s manual.