Product Listing

OCZ Vector 180: A decent but unspectacular high-end drive

By Kenny Yeo - 7 May 2015

Introduction

OCZ: Life after Toshiba

OCZ's new company logo clearly states its relationship with NAND memory giants Toshiba.

OCZ is not a greenhorn in the SSD industry. Founded in 2002, the company has been involved with manufacturing SSDs from the start. And even if it did not enjoy the advantage of having its own NAND production facilities, OCZ did well to differentiate itself from the competition and made a number of key acquisitions - Indilinx and PLX's UK-based R&D team - which later culminated in the Barefoot 3, OCZ’s first in-house developed controller.

Having an in-house controller is key to differentiation in this highly competitive space. For example, a year fews back, almost every high-end drive was powered by SandForce’s SF-2281 controller. Right now, the popular choice is Marvell’s 88SS9187 and 88SS9189 controllers, with Phison’s S8 and S10 controller slowly emerging as popular alternatives. As you can see, there’s not much variety, so being able to create your own competitive controller gives not only a potentially unassailable performance advantage, it also gives a sense of exclusivity and prestige.

In 2012, OCZ finally debuted its Barefoot 3 controller in the OCZ Vector. It was an excellent drive for its time and offered very high levels of performance, though that all came at a high price. In the end, things did not quite play out the way OCZ would have liked. Some users reported reliability issues with the Vector - though its pretty much hit-and-miss - and OCZ was faced with stiff competition from the likes of Crucial and Samsung. In the end, OCZ was forced to declare bankruptcy in the later part of 2013.

Fortunately, Toshiba came to rescue and completed the acquisition of OCZ in early 2014. This move signaled Toshiba’s intent to be a major player in the SSD scene. Toshiba is one of the few brands to have its own NAND production facilities and although it has its own controller - the TC358790XBG in the Q-Series - it was not very competitive against other flagship drives. But now that it has OCZ’s Barefoot 3 controller under its umbrella, it is ready to mount a serious assault on challenging dominant players like Crucial and Samsung.

This is how the new Vector 180 fits into OCZ's lineup of drives.

To begin, OCZ refreshed its mainstream Vertex lineup with the Vertex 460, which utilized Toshiba’s own 19nm MLC NAND. They later followed up with the AMD Radeon R7 SSD, which was a collaboration with AMD; and then introduced a new entry-level drive called the ARC 100. And now, it is ready to challenge for top honors with the Vector 180.

 

The Vector 180

The Vector 180 is the third refresh of OCZ's flagship SATA SSD.

The Vector 180 is essentially an update of the older Vector 150. The Vector 150 already used Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND, so there was no need to refresh that model until now when OCZ is ready to add more meaningful improvements to the drive. The Vector 180 continues the use of Toshiba’s 19nm MLC NAND and also OCZ’s own Barefoot 3 controller - the faster M00 variant that runs at 397MHz and not the M10 as used in the Vertex 460 and ARC 100 that runs at a slower 352MHz. Drive endurance is rated at 50GB a day, comparable to other high-end drives such as the Intel SSD 730 and Samsung SSD 850 Pro. The interface is SATA 6Gbps.

OCZ's Power Management Failure Plus feature helps protect the drive against bricking from sudden power loss.

The key improvement to the Vector 180 is a power failure management feature that OCZ calls Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+). We first saw this drive at Computex last year, but that was a prototype drive that had a more comprehensive power failure protection feature that would quickly write data stored in the cache to the drive. The final version of the Vector 180, does not do that. Instead, it only protects data that has already been written to the drive and will quickly create a mapping table snapshot of the drive when it detects any anomaly to the power delivery. This reduces the risk of the mapping table being corrupted, which could end up bricking the drive.

The SSD Guru utility is easy to navigate and use, and will work with any OCZ drive utilizing its Barefoot 3 controller.

If your chassis does not have 2.5-inch drive bays, OCZ has got you covered.

Another new feature of the Vector 180 is the SSD Guru drive management tool. Its a nifty utility that lets users quickly update the firmware of their drives and check its health status and other details. For example, it can show users the remaining lifespan of their drives and can even allow users to determine how much capacity should be set aside for over-provisioning. Also new to the Vector 180 is OCZ’s new ShieldPlus warranty program (more on this later in the article) and the addition of a 960GB model that was made possible by using Toshiba’s high-density 128Gbit NAND.

Like all other OCZ drives, the Vector 180 comes with a 3.5-inch HDD installation adapter, Acronis True Image HD cloning utility, and the drive itself comes in a thick and heavy chassis like other OCZ drives do.

 

Test Setup

The OCZ Vector 180 will be tested on our dedicated storage testbed:

  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
  • ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
  • 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
  • MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
  • Windows 7

Our revised benchmark ditches older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also includes an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance. The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

  • AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
  • CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
  • PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
  • Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
  • Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

Since the Vector 180 and Vector 150 are mostly identical, save for the former’s new firmware, it will be interesting to see how the new drive matches up against the older Vector 150. Also interesting is how the Vector 180 will fare against other high-end drives like the Samsung SSD 850 Pro, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Plextor M6 Pro.

Here is the list of drives tested:

  • OCZ Vector 180
  • OCZ Vector 150
  • SanDisk Extreme Pro
  • Samsung SSD 850 Pro
  • Plextor M6 Pro
  • Crucial M550
  • Samsung SSD 850 Evo
Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
7.5
  • Performance 7.5
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 8
The Good
Underwhelming performance
Bundled 3.5-inch HDD adapter and cloning utility
SSD Guru management utility
Power failure protection
Decently priced
The Bad
No longer blazing fast by today's standard
ShieldPlus warranty program not available locally
Heavy for an SSD - a concern for notebook users
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.