OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-240G
Review by A. Johnson : Way fast and easy to install

I dropped this into my Win 7 Core i7 desktop machine the lazy way -- just cloned my C: drive onto it using the same Acronis software I use for backup. Worked right off the bat, and registered maximum transfers of 280mgps on ATTO, which is just shy of the limit for my SATA II ports. I then tried switching it to my Marvell SATA III port, which I never was able to get working for conventional hard drives. It booted! On SATA III, it reach a bit over 400mbps, which is shy of the advertised 550, but great for that funky Marvell chipset and its buggy drivers.

I eventually switched back to an Intel-supported SATA II port to avoid bluescreens -- but would stress that these fingered the Marvell SATA III drivers as the cause. Someday when I have more free time, I'l try reinstalling Windows from scratch on the Vertex 3, which is what they seem to recommend on my motherboard forums, but for now I'm plenty happy with 280mbps.

Sooo.... if you can stomach the price, I'd recommend this SSD for Windows 7 even if you do not have SATA III. Would also recommend leaving your machine at the login screen on a regular basis, as this seems to let the TRIM support operate better. In any case, I find that programs load faster the next morning when I do this. All in all, count me happy.

OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-240G
Review by Ray Rose : Did Just what I wanted

I only have SATA II at this time and if it is this fast now I cannot wait till I upgrade motherboard to SATA III. If they could lower price would be only thing to change.

OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-240G
Review by Michael G. Lustig : Once you get it working, it rocks

My install was in a laptop and my BIOS SATA setting needed to be changed to ATA before I got this working.

The drive is actually a little chunkier than a standard HDD. I'd say it's bigger in the < 1mm range. This posed a slight problem coaxing it into my Dell XPS L701X primary drive bay.

You might be saying "Hey dummy you have an SATA II controller - Why are you buying an SATA III drive?" The reason is random seek time. This is the amount of time it takes the drive to move from one place to another. HDD technology with moving parts had good throughput but slow seek times because the drive heads have to move.

Solid state memory doesn't have seek-related delays so it's really fast all the time. The drawback - other than price - is that it can only be written to so many times before it fails. This make the 2 million hour MTBF (average lifespan) inconsequential since it will likely be used-up well before that.

Don't abandon me yet! Your cell phone, PDA, smart device, iWhatever all use solid state memory and are all subject to the same limitations. The difference is that PCs running Windows can accelerate disk lifespan consumption. Yes, if you do something as simple as defragmenting the SSD daily it will drastically reduce the lifespan. (You'll want to turn that off since it's probably on.)

My setup is a OCZ Vertex 3 240GB and a Samsung 7200RPM 500GB HDD. I only point this out to explain my configuration.

In my case I have a SSD and a conventional HDD. The HDD, while slower, can be written to until it suffers a physical failure; which, is much longer than a SSD.

In other words, the SSD should not be used for things that change a lot. In particular, documents, email, photos, music, etc. have all bee relocated to my HDD. Windows 7 is pretty good about relocating these items to a new drive but Outlook required more effort.

Another huge disk abuser is the pagefile. If the OCZ SSD is the primary drive then Windows automatically creates a pagefile. The implications are incalculable. I moved the 18GB pagefile to my HDD and deleted it from the SSD.

The end result is that I installed programs and Windows to the SSD. I put as much changing data as possible on my HDD.

As far as speed goes, it's very fast. Windows loads from power on in under 15 seconds (and much of that is the BIOS booting). Office applications open in about a second each. This is because of the excellent random seek performance of this drive. If the drive can outperform my controller than I'm good with that since I'll use it again in another application later.

My Windows Experience for disk performance went from a 5.9 to a 7.0 which I suspect is the maximum for my chipset. My overall score went from 5.9 to 6.9 on a Dell XPS L701X laptop. Updated NVDIA Graphics drivers affected my overall score improvement too.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT - FORGET ABOUT IT

I do this for a living so installing Windows from scratch is no big deal. Before I figured out the BIOS setting that was flaking out my drive, I installed Windows 7 four times on two different laptops. Simply put, the only variable was the new OCZ SSD since both laptops worked fine with their original HDDs and failed consistently with the OCZ SSD. As a last resort, I called OCZ because I was ready to box the drive up and send it back. I got through to "Technical Support" and explained that Windows 7 wouldn't boot and briefly blue-screened before rebooting. The response was to contact Microsoft. I've used that line myself. I asked if they had any diagnostic tools or troubleshooting tips and the response was a firm "No!"

After informing the "Technician" that my drive was inoperative and I had no choice but to return it he said "Oh Well... If that's what you have to do. Is there anything else I can help you with?" Yeah buddy, how about you tell me to set my SATA setting to ATA in the BIOS? OCZ spent millions of dollars making this thing and the industry is pushing hard to displace HDDs - so what's with the incompetent technical support OCZ? Thanks for nothing - I figured it out by trial and error myself - something I love to do on expensive new hardware.