The hard drive is another important PC component that has seen quite an evolutionary change over many decades. It is simply amazing to think about hard drives of yore that had less than 1mb of storage costing thousands of dollars; then technologically advancing into the gigabytes and even terabytes than can now fit into the palm of our hands. That readers, is one reason why I am so fascinated and drawn to the world of consumer electronics.
Over the recent years, solid-state drives or SSDs have become all the rave due to their high-speed performance, low power consumption, and silent operation. As far as raw speed goes, a traditional mechanical hard drive cannot compete with an SSD. The downside for SSDs, however, has been capacity limitations, stability issues, and higher costs.
Thankfully, manufacturers such as OCZ have been working hard on these issues; and we are starting to see larger capacities at lower prices as well as increased stability on newer controllers.
 
Today we will be test-driving the Vector 150 Series 120GB SSD from OCZ to see just how this new drive stacks up against a couple of other drives that we have here in the shop. Sporting maximum sequential read and write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 450MB/s respectively, SATA III operation, a five-year warranty, and enterprise-quality construction; OCZ gives us high hopes that this drive will be very popular with consumers looking to make the jump to a solid-state solution for their storage needs.