A couple of months ago I took a look at one of OCZ's mainstream solid state drives, the 120 GB Apex and had the opportunity to pair two together in a RAID0 configuration. As I concluded in that review, the decision to run two Apex drives in RAID0 really comes down to how much capacity you need for an operating system drive. The pair were very fast of course and offered a lot of storage space as far as SSDs are concerned, but not everyone needs 240 GB of super fast storage. Secondary hard drives and external units are dirt cheap and provide enough speed to hold all of your photos, music, movies, etc. And although cheap for the capacity, two 120 GB Apex drives will still set you back around $600.

Users interested in a blazing fast RAID0 SSD setup but don't require that much storage have other options, however. Another popular line of SSDs from OCZ is the Vertex, which starts out at only 30 GB versus the Apex entry level model at 60 GB. The Vertex is categorized as a performance solid state drive and although it uses the same multi-level cell (MLC) technology as the Apex, there are some notable upgrades inside, including the Indilinx SSD controller and the inclusion of 64 MB of onboard cache. The Vertex is more expensive per GB than the Apex, but the dual 30 GB configuration we will be tinkering with today will only set you back $300, half the price of the dual Apex drives we used... but only 25% of the capacity.


The 30 GB Vertex arrived in the mostly white and black retail package that you see above. A photo of the drive along with some features can be found on the front while the reverse has a paragraph detailing some more features of the drive and a specifications list. Below is a complete list of specs borrowed from OCZ's website.



The two Apex drives in RAID0 set the highest storage drive benchmarks we have seen here at OCIA.net and I am very curious to see how these two smaller Vertex drives will stack up. Continue ahead as we take a closer look at these solid state drives...