Introduction

OCZ is one of the earliest adopters of SSD technology, and their products have always been at the forefront of technology. After some financial issues in 2012, the company was bought by Toshiba. Last year, OCZ completed their transition to use Toshiba flash chips only, and today, we are reviewing the Vector 180, their first new product in 2015.

The new OCZ Vector 180 is based on the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller: It is, given Indilinx was acquired by OCZ in 2011, the first OCZ controller with 100% in-house technology.

The Vector 180 uses 19 nanometer NAND flash made by Toshiba, with the Barefoot 3 controller connected to a SATA 6 Gbps interface. The major change as compared to the Vector 150 is that the Vector 180 now includes Power Failure Management logic. It detects power anomalies to protect already stored data on the drive to, for instance, avoid bricking the whole SSD because of a power failure. In-flight data is not protected, neither is unflushed data in the operating system's write-cache. The power-failure-protection feature is achieved by using firmware logic and a small amount of capacitance on the SSD.

OCZ offers the Vector 180 in capacities of 120 GB ($90), 240 GB ($150), 480 GB ($275), and 960 GB ($500).