OCZ Vertex 3 Pro

OCZ Vertex 3 Pro SandForce SF-2000 Based SSD Preview

OCZ Technologies' Vertex 2 series of products are undeniably some of the more popular Solid State Drives currently on the market. Since their introduction, the drives have offered excellent performance, competitive prices (which have dropped considerably in recent weeks), and excellent support in terms of constant firmware updates and guidance / tweaks via the OCZ forum community, from both customers and OCZ staff. While the Vertex 2 is still amongst the elite SSDs available, OCZ is reading a family of follow-up products that are going to raise the bar considerably. Like the Vertex 2, the upcoming Vertex 3 series of products leverages SandForce's excellent SSD controller technology, but this time around SandForce's next-gen SF-2000 family of processors are at the heart of the drives. As it turns out, SandForce's SF-2000 improves upon their previous generation of controllers in essentially every way. Although products are not quite ready for retail, OCZ gave us the opportunity to take a beta, engineering sample of their upcoming Vertex 3 Pro enterprise-class SSD for a spin and we've got our preliminary evaluation posted on the pages ahead.