OCZ Vertex 3 or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G

Both seem like very good drives. Around the same benchmarks.

What makes me want to get OWC is the reliability, quality, made in United States and there warranty.

What do you guys recommend?

This will be for my upcoming Alienware M14x? Any other SSD's I should look at or wait for..?

 

OWC as far as I can tell is a small vendor using SF controllers. Do they have their own assembly line or they just employ some bigger players with their own choice of NAND and firmware image ?

 

The OWC 120GB seems a bit faster than the OCZ: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 120GB Solid State Drive Review - Benchmarks - PCMark Vantage Hard Disk Tests :: TweakTown USA Edition

I have no experience with OWC so can't really comment on them.

OCZ has had their issues with Vertex 2 but maybe they've learned from it. They have released a faster Vertex 3 product called Vertex 3 MAXIO.

 

I think the difference is the type of NAND you get? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but with OCZ, it's a grab bag, but with OWC they only use one source for NAND. The controllers (SandForce) will be the same on both.

 

I'll just throw out the Micron C400/Crucial M4 here as no one has mentioned it. It performs above it's rated specs as the review below shows. Also, you can get a 256GB for $450. That's a steal with the overall results of this drive.

Crucial M4 256GB SATA 3 SSD Review ? Unexpected Performance in a Small Package | The SSD Review

 

Where are you getting this price from?

 

MTFDDAC256MAM-1K1 Micron 2.5 inch 256GB RealSSD C400 SATA3 Solid State Drive(MLC) - SSD Solid State Drives - SuperBiiz.com

Suprisingly, it's in stock as of this post.

 

I don't suppose there's anywhere else to get the C400's? I'm currently thinking of RAID'ing 2 OCZ Vertex 3 120 gb's but then it has been sitting there in my order history on Amazon for 7 days now. I've just been waiting for Amazon to restock, which will be another week apparently...

Anyway, I slowly start thinking "do I really need to RAID these?" Instead of spending $600, I could spend ~$400 and get more space and the performance will still be fast if I got one of the Crucials...

So now I'm leaning towards either the Crucial C300 256GB SSD's, if the C400 doesn't come soon within the next few days, or the C400 256GB, if I find it somewhere. Which I have apparently, but I just wanna know if I can get it somewhere cheaper

 

I was for a very short time thinking that I should have gotten the C400 (ordered my C300 yesterday), but at the price you can get the C300 for, you can't beat it.
You can get it on Amazon from a Markteplace vendor for $373. That is only $1.46 /GB. Hell you could Raid 2 of these for only a bit more than your idea of raiding the V3 but have double the capacity. Yes, raiding the V3 is carzy fast, but do you really need that much speed? You will loose more time sneezing than waiting for your drive to load

 

Been reading people's experience with the Vertex 3 from around the forums and it seems that the same problems with the Vertex 2 are still lingering around... stuttering, freezing, sleep issues to name a few.

 

I heard Raid'ing SSD's with crappy Garbage Collection (i.e. Crucial ssd's) is suicide though. Isn't OCZ is known for having top-notch GC, and with their latest product wouldn't it be the best? Some people even claim that with their insanely good GC, it's okay to RAID 0 these and lose the support of TRIM. And yeah I know TRIM is still the better alternative.

I don't need THAT much speed but why not :3

 

Known as in 'OCZ support staff claims' or something else ?

 

According to Anandtech Sandforce's GC is one of the better ones. Better than Intel, Samsung and Crucial.

It will throttle sequential writes for incompressible data though. If that's important to you take another SSD.

 

any link for that ? as better is a very broad word.

 

Seq Write throttling? You must be kidding

 

No offense, but speaking of reliability, the only thing worse than one OCZ drive is two in Raid 0. That's just asking for complete data loss. No, I'm not an OCZ hater, I've just been burned too many times.

 

With better I mean quicker to regain speeds. It's usually covered in his reviews. He advises against Intel G2, G3 and Crucial C300, C400 w/o TRIM.

 

StorageReview: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD Review (240GB) | StorageReview.com

Bottomline: Offering SATA 6Gb/s saturating speeds, the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G blasts the doors off other SSDs, and stays neck and neck wtih the OCZ Vertex 3 pretty much throughout.