OCZ's first new product in 2015 doesn't really impress me. It feels virtually identical to the AMD Radeon R7 SSD (which is also made by OCZ). The flash controller and memory chips are the same, with the only physical change being the addition of a capacitor that stores some power so the drive can continue running for a short moment should a power outage occur. This capacitor is the foundation for OCZ's new Power Failure Management Plus technology, which protects the drive from losing all stored data in a power outage. It does not save in-flight data or data that's in the operating system's write-cache. In my opinion, it is not a big deal because a power outage will inadvertently lead to a complete loss of power anyway (unsaved application data etc.). OCZ's five-year warranty also underlines the company's confidence in their product.

In terms of performance, the Vector 180 delivers the same performance when averaged over all our benchmarks as the Radeon R7 SSD. The Crucial MX100 is 3% faster, and our fastest tested drives (Toshiba HG6, Samsung 840 Pro, Crucial MX200) are 6% faster. Such small percentages are not a lot, and I doubt you'll notice a subjective difference between these drives. Still, people who want the fastest will look elsewhere. What I find more important is that competing drives can also be had for less, which means better price/performance AND better price per Gigabyte.

A markup of $30 over the Radeon R7 SSD, which is basically the same drive without the power-outage-protection feature, seems unreasonable. Once OCZ manages to get their pricing down to $120 or below, I could see this drive becoming an interesting choice, but until then, drives like the Crucial MX and Samsung EVO Series are the better choice.