Toshiba OCZ VX500 SATA SSD Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.
Product Name: OCZ VX500 MLC Solid State Drive
Part Number: VX500-25SAT3-512G
UPC: 842024037934
Prices: 128GB – $66.50, 256GB – $96.99, 512GB – $154.99, 1TB – $334.99 (Newegg)

Full Disclosure: Toshiba/OCZ provided the product sample used in this article.

OCZ Storage Solutions was acquired by Toshiba, and they’ve been repurposed as Toshiba’s consumer/enthusiast brand for solid state storage. Benchmark Reviews has previously tested both the budget OCZ Trion SSD and the premium OCZ RD400 m.2 PCIe SSD; the new VX500 represents the middle of Toshiba/OCZ’s SSD range. At the time of our reviews, the 512GB RD400 was $309.99 while the 480GB Trion 150 was $139.99; with a price of $154.99, the OCZ VX500 SSD is only slightly more than the budget Trion 150 (whose price has since dropped), but it’s still much less expensive than the RD400. Let’s see how the performance and features compare.

VX500-25SAT3 Specifications

Solid State vs Hard Disk

Benchmark Reviews has championed SSDs over hard disks for many years, as we feel that even when prices were much higher than they are now, the superior performance was worth it. Now that SSD prices have come down dramatically, there’s little reason for any but the most basic computers to use a spinning hard disk as a primary drive.

However, we’re now in the middle of another transition: within the last 18 months or so, standard SATA SSDs have all run up against what used to be the performance province of only the higher-end drives: the bandwidth limitations of the SATA interface. This means that no matter how fast your SSD is, you’re never going to see more than about 550MB/s transfer rates unless you stripe multiple drives together in RAID 0.

The solution, of course, is to move from SATA to PCI-E and to replace the AHCI protocol with the newer NvME protocol. However, while PCI-E drives offer much better performance, they’re significantly more expensive than SATA drives, and in most consumer workloads the extra performance makes little difference. We expect SATA drives to make up the bulk of the SSD market for at least a couple more years.