Armed with the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00, the Vector 150 has the same controller found on the original Vector SSD which was marketed towards a 'performance user'. OCZ aim the Vector 150 to the 'enthusiast' market while the Vertex remains focussed on the mainstream segment. The difference? We're not sure as an enthusiast demands performance however, much like slapping 'Ultra/super/classified' (insert excessive adjective here), OCZ hope to capture the users who want the very best, in this instance, the Vector 150.


There have been two enhancements since the Vector 450. First and foremost and perhaps the key selling point is the durability of the SSD. OCZ warrant this drive for 50GB of writes per day which is 30GB of writes more per day than the original Vector. This is of course backed up by OCZ's five year warranty. The second improvement is hardware encryption. While the drive does not support Bitlocker (Windows it does afford protection with AES-256 hardware encryption for secure data erasing and encryption.


So, we have seen the difference between the original Vector now for the difference between the Vector 450 and today's Vector 150. The Vector 450 utilised 20nm IMFT IC's whereas today's sample uses Toshiba's 19nm MLC synchronous flash NAND chips. The Vector uses a 16 x 16GB profile giving a theoretical 256GB however in a Windows environment the SSD will likely show 240GB and hence the drive is marketed as such.


Here we see one of the Micron DDR3 512MB chips which makes up the 1GB of DRAM cache available to the Indilinx controller.


Taking pride of place in the centre of the PCB is of course the Indilinx controller (IDX500M00-BC). This features an ARM Cortex processor along with an OCZ Aragon co-processor which have 1GB DRAM of cache at their disposal.