OCZ's Vector SSD is an excellent new drive that will provide positive momentum to OCZ, which has recently been plagued by poor business news. This drive's in-house Indilinx controller and its cheap, readily available synchronous NAND flash also lead to better margins for OCZ by ensuring cheap production costs. In our testing, we see the Vector 256 GB cruise past most other drives, no matter which controller they use. In our real-life testing, the Vector is about an average of 5% faster than Sandforce-based SSDs. Only the MX DS Turbo with its SLC NAND flash chips is 1% faster, but also twice as expensive at half the capacity.
Our endurance testing reveals that the Vector deals with block use and fragmentation better than other drives - something that OCZ says to have been working on actively. We, nevertheless, recommend using no more than 80% of the drive for optimum performance. You could fill up more space if you need all the space you can get, but didn't you buy an SSD to have a fast drive?
Our MySQL enterprise testing also shows that the drive delivers leading performance with high numbers of connected clients, which means its controller architecture should also do well in the enterprise market, which is very important for OCZ.
Pricing of the OCZ Vector is quite steep at $270 for the 256 GB version if you consider that similar-sized, marginally slower SSDs are available for less than $200. OCZ is clearly asking a premium for their new technology, and I wish they'd at least reduce pricing below $250. The included TrueImage HD might offset the cost for you if you need a data transfer utility, or just reinstall the OS like most users do. As mentioned before, the drive should be very cheap for them to make - most probably cheaper than for other SSD vendors, since they all have to license controller technology from a 3rd party company.