The last few months have not been easy at OCZ. After long-lasting financial issues, the company filed for bankruptcy on November 27th and a week later Toshiba announced that it will be acquiring the assets for $35 million.

Yesterday OCZ announced that the acquistion has been completed and were finally able to shed some lights to the details of the deal. To my surprise, OCZ will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary and won't be integrated into Toshiba's own SSD team. I'm guessing Toshiba sees financial potential in OCZ and is hence keeping things as they are. The only change aside from the change of ownership is a new brand logo and name: OCZ is now called OCZ Storage Solutions to further emphasize the focus of the company. Last time I heard OCZ was looking for a buyer for its PSU business but it seems they've not found one yet.

Update 1/31: We finally have an official statement regarding warranties.

Update 2/1: OCZ has a buyer for its PSU division and we'll have more details in a couple of weeks. The RAM and cooling divisions have been discontinued a long while ago, though.

Comparison of OCZ's Barefoot 3 Based SSDs
  Vector 150 Vertex 460 Vector Vertex 450
Controller Indilinx Barefoot 3
NAND 19nm Toshiba 19nm Toshiba 25nm IMFT 20nm IMFT
Over-Provisioning 12% 12% 7% 7%
Encryption AES-256 AES-256 N/A AES-256
Endurance 50GB/day for 5 years 20GB/day for 3 years 20GB/day for 5 years 20GB/day for 3 years
Warranty 5 years 3 years 5 years 3 years

The Vertex 460 resembles OCZ's flagship Vector 150 a lot. In terms of hardware the only difference between the two is that the Barefoot 3 controller in the Vertex 460 is slightly lower clocked than the one in Vector 150. The Barefoot 3 in the Vector 150 runs at 397MHz while in the Vertex 460 it's clocked at 352MHz. The speed of the controller isn't proportional to the overall performance but there are scenarios (like intensive read/write workloads) where a faster controller will help.

Both drives actually use exactly the same NAND (identical part numbers) but each Vector 150 goes through more testing and validation cycles to make sure the higher endurance criteria is met. Even though the NAND should be the same in both drives, bear in mind that endurance specifications are always minimums -- one part can be more durable than the other as long as both meet spec. By doing additional validation, OCZ is able to pick the highest endurance parts and use them in the Vector 150, whereas lower quality chips (but good enough to meet the mainstream endurance requirements) end up in the Vertex 460. 

The choice of identical NAND in both models is indeed odd but I'm guessing that Toshiba had a hand in this. The Vertex 450 used Micron's NAND but obviously Toshiba doesn't want to use a competitor's NAND in their products, hence the Vertex 450 is replaced with the 460 and Toshiba NAND.

OCZ Vertex 460 Specifications
Capacity 120GB 240GB 480GB
Sequential Read 530MB/s 540MB/s 545MB/s
Sequential Write 420MB/s 525MB/s 525MB/s
4KB Random Read 80K IOPS 85K IOPS 95K IOPS
4KB Random Write 90K IOPS 90K IOPS 90K IOPS
Steady-State 4KB Random Write 12K IOPS 21K IOPS 23K IOPS

Similar to the Vector 150, the Vertex 460 switches to 12% over-provisioning. This seems to be an industry wide trend and to be honest I'm happy with that. The few percents extra makes a huge difference in terms of IO consistency, which in the end accounts for a better user experience. 

Test System

CPU Intel Core i5-2500K running at 3.3GHz (Turbo and EIST enabled)
Motherboard AsRock Z68 Pro3
Chipset Intel Z68
Chipset Drivers Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2
Memory G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 4 x 8GB (9-9-9-24)
Video Card Palit GeForce GTX 770 JetStream 2GB GDDR5 (1150MHz core clock; 3505MHz GDDR5 effective)
Video Drivers NVIDIA GeForce 332.21 WHQL
Desktop Resolution 1920 x 1080
OS Windows 7 x64

Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsX 32GB DDR3 DRAM kit

Performance Consistency & TRIM Validation
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  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 24, 2014 - link

    Thanks, fixed!
  • Per Hansson - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link

    It's mind boggling why Toshiba would like to keep the name OCZ.
    I actually thought OCZ had improved since the debacles of the old Vertex drives, but then I found this:
    http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-7/ssd.html
    http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html

    40 > 50% failure rate on the Petrol & Octane series SSD's
    10% on Agility 4
    And then even more troubling from the following article:
    OCZ Vector with 9 to 11% failure rate

    No thank you
  • dbwells - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link

    Was the SanDisk Extreme II 480GB really only $300 two days ago? Showing $450 at the moment :(
  • FalcomPSX - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link

    you couldn't pay me to use an OCZ product again. i've lost 4 vertex 2 ssd's due to random failures, and although they covered it under warranty each time(yes i bought one drive, died 4 times) its not worth the hassle or risk of data loss, especially when that risk of data loss isn't a question of IF it will fail, but only a question of WHEN it will fail.
  • mattgmann - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link

    I'd love to see some SSD comparison/ranking charts. There's such a wide variety of makes/controllers out there these days that it's getting too hard to keep track of the best performance/dollar, reliability/dollar or best drive/specific use.

    Plus, we all like rankings...right?
  • arehaas - Sunday, January 26, 2014 - link

    Why does the clear Storage Bench champion according to this page, 840 EVO mSATA, have 322.9 MB/s data rate on this page but only 261.5MB/s on its own review page on Jan 9, 2014??
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, January 26, 2014 - link

    When I first generated the graphs, our Bench had the old value (322.9MB/s) in it. I manually updated the graph with the newer and more reasonable 261.5MB/s result but for some reason the actual graph wasn't updated. It's fixed now!
  • arehaas - Sunday, January 26, 2014 - link

    Thank you for the quick reply. It will help me to select components for upgrading my laptop.
  • jeff420 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link

    These is a beast. I have this for awhile now and can't complain.

    Jeff @ http://www.audiospeakerworld.com

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