Introduction

OCZ is one of the earliest adopters of SSD technology, and their products have always been at the forefront of technology. A few years back, the company was acquired by Toshiba, which gave OCZ the ability to be a first-class customer to Toshiba's flash chips and other NAND-related technology. In the meantime OCZ has been fully integrated into Toshiba as their more consumer-oriented brand, while Toshiba focuses on business and enterprise.

Today, we are reviewing the OCZ VX500. The shortened VX stands for Vertex, but has been unified to be more inline with Toshiba's two-letter product naming.

Unlike many other recent drives, the VX500 does not use TLC and comes with MLC instead, which claims to offer better performance, reliability, and longevity. The VX500 will replace the aging OCZ Vector 180 / VT180, but should come at better pricing. At this time, the VX500 is available in capacities of 128 GB ($64), 256 GB ($93), 512 GB ($153), and 1 TB ($337).

For our review of the VX500 we will be testing the 512 GB version, which is slowly overtaking the previous 256 GB as the sweet-spot capacity for consumers and gamers.

Instead of the Indilinx controller of the Vector 180, OCZ is now using a Toshiba TC358790, a model we've seen on the Q300 before, for example. The flash chips are also made by Toshiba. Marked as "TH58TFG9DFLBA8C," these are 512 Gbit MLC NAND 15 nanometer chips.