OCZ's Vertex 4 SSD Revisited: 128GB and New Firmware Tested

Back in April, we ran a pair of OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs (256GB and 512GB) through the benchmark grinder to see what they could do and also told you everything you ever wanted to know about them in the process. Today, we’re testing another brother in the family, the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4. When we first tested the aforementioned drives, we found that the latest generation of the Vertex series delivered somewhat uneven performance. In some workloads, the drives more or less smoked the competition, while they stumbled a bit in others. The bottom line was that the OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs were mostly impressive, but they didn’t demonstrate quite the upgrade from the previous-generation Vertex 3s that we would have liked.

Between then and now, however, OCZ has tended to the Vertex 4 SSD line by upgrading its firmware. On the pages ahead we’ll get a gander at how the updated 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 stacks up against other drives with similar capacities and see if it can demonstrate a greater performance enhancement over the competition than the 256GB and 512GB versions did. We’ll also check in on how (or if) pricing has changed over the last few months; in April, the Vertex 4s were going for about $1.47 per GiB, which put them right around of the middle of the competition in terms of cost.

First, though, let’s have a look at the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4’s specs.