DIt has been almost exactly one year, that OCZ released their first Vector SSD series. In our review on the first Vector we mentioned that it is a solid drive, which performed very good and it's even able to keep with todays fastest drives. So, what could have possibly been improved with the new Vector 150?

First of all we want to have a look at what stayed the same. Apparently the Indilinx IDX500M00-BC controller, which OCZ was using in the original Vector is a really good controller, since the new Vector 150 uses the same chip. Nevertheless there is one thing about the Vector 150 line-up which we think is worth mentioning. Since OCZ is proud of being at the forefront of SSD development we would have expected that there was a 960 Gigabyte Version of this drive, but so far the largest drive is a 480 Gigabyte model.

Now to the improvements: one upgrade concerns the NAND chips. OCZ decided to equip the Vector 150 with 19 nanometre Toogle NAND from Toshiba, which offers 3'000 P/E cycles, which is basically a very reasonable value. Other than that OCZ is using almost nine percent of the drives capacity for overprovisioning purposes. Overprovisioning is helping with endurance, sustained performance as well as keeping the warranty high. Especially when it comes to endurance OCZ offers quite an improvement over the first Vector drive. With the Vector 150, OCZ now advertises that the drive can withstand 50 Gigabyte write per day over a five year period, which is 150 percent more than what the original Vector had to offer (20 Gigabyte per day for five years). This 150 percent improvement is what influenced the name of the Vector 150, which means, that OCZ must be rather proud of this level of endurance.