We saw an early preview of OCZ's Vertex 4 back at CeBIT, nearly a month ago now and it seems like OCZ has decided that it was time to launch its new SSD series. The interesting part here is the controller used, namely the Indilinx Everest 2 which is something of an in-house solution considering OCZ owns Indilinx.Indilinx has managed to improve the performance of the Everest 2 significantly compared to the Everest controller and we're looking at a 400MHz SoC with support for a wide range of current and upcoming NAND flash memory types, up to 1GB of local cache memory, encryption and improved error correction. The company claims transfer rates of up to 535MB/s with synchronous flash and the new Vertex 4 series isn't far off in some tests.OCZ has of course rated the Vertex 4 at 535MB/s in sequential tests and up to 120,000 IOPS for random performance. This is quite a lot higher than what the company claimed for the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS. Interestingly, the first reviews have all found that the Vertex 4 has blisteringly fast write speeds, whereas the read performance leaves quite a bit to be desired. This is very much the opposite that we're used of seeing when it comes to SSDs.
The Vertex 4 is one of the fastest SSD's when it comes to dealing with incompressible data writes, but apparently OCZ was in a bit of a hurry getting the Vertex 4 out there and as such it doesn't handle small transfers well. According to Anandtech this is related to two issues, lack of NCQ streaming for queue depths of less than three and no pipelined read access for more than eight concurrent NAND die. Apparently OCZ is working on fixing the NCQ issue and this should be solved by a firmware update, but the second issue isn't likely to be as easy to solve. That said, unless you're dealing with massive amounts of tiny files, you're likely to suffer much ill effect.It's still early days for the Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller and we have a feeling that given some time, we'll see performance improvements to the read performance as OCZ tunes the firmware to suit various market needs. On the plus side, the Everest 2 is said to have very good garbage collection which means that performance over time won't suffer nearly as much as it does on many SandForce based SSDs.OCZ is trying to hit some very competitive price points with the Vertex 4, with the 128GB SKU having an MSRP of US$179, with the 256GB SKU coming in at US$349 and finally the 512GB SKU at $699 which makes it one of the cheapest SSD's out there today. What's even better is that OCZ includes a five year warranty at this price, which suggests that they're very confident about their product.Source: OCZ, Anandtech

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