OCZ Vertex 2 with 25nm flash perform worse than 34nm units

[Borimol]

OCZ is now shipping Vertex 2 solid state disks with 25nm NAND flash memory but unfortunately the die shrink has a couple of serious disadvantages. An OCZ employee wrote on the company's support forum that 25nm NAND is not as robust as the previous generation in regards to the voltage needed for write and erases. While the previous generation had a program-erase cycle rating of 5,000, the SSDs with 25nm flash have a program-erase cycle of only 3,000x.

To still provide a decent life expectation, OCZ increased the amount of NAND set aside for over-provisioning by a couple of gigabytes. For instance, a 120GB disk has an unformatted capacity of 115GB, and only 107GB of this capacity is available in Windows.

Reduced life expectancy is one major disadvantage of the 25nm flash, and unfortunately a second side effect is slower performance. Dutch tech site Tweakers reports users of 25nm Vertex 2 SSDs complain about poor performance, especially when handling uncompressable data the 25nm flash seems to perform a lot poorer than its 34nm predecessor.

Via: http://www.dvhardware.net/article48180.html

[epk]

Any advantages?

[Borimol]

Any advantages?

Yes, buy HDD :laugh:

[Raa]

While the previous generation had a program-erase cycle rating of 5,000, the SSDs with 34nm flash have a program-erase cycle of only 3,000x.

Should that read "25nm", not 34?

Either way, that's not very long (for what I do). I'll stay with traditionals for now...

[Borimol]

Should that read "25nm", not 34?

Yes. I have already corrected it.

[guru]

this is more due to the controller than 25nm NAND. Intel delayed its launch which was supposed to be in Jan/Feb for the same reason.

[MR_Candyman]

So glad they cut back their business for focus on SSD...

[iascoot]

I got a vertex 2 recently, how can I tell what type it contains ?

[ViperAFK]

I got a vertex 2 recently, how can I tell what type it contains ?

If it came with 1.25 firmware its 34nm, if it came with 1.27/1.28 it can be either. Only concrete way is opening up the drive and looking at the chips.

Mine is probably 25nm and I don't care, its still fast as hell compared to any hard drive I've used. Used as a boot drives the main most common write operations is stuff like installing applications and thats ridiculously fast on this SSD. And the main strength of SSD's are random reads which is still as fast as the 34nm drives, and magnitudes faster than any hdd. Sequential write is probably the least important stat when it comes to storage devices.

[ahhell]

Wow. That's a big fail on OCZ's part.

[ViperAFK]

Wow. That's a big fail on OCZ's part.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?84598-Drives-Shipping-With-25nm-NAND.-Q-amp-A&p=600434&viewfull=1#post600434

Life expectancy remains unchanged for desktop use as does the warranty. The Sandforce controller is in a better position to cope with the downsides of 25nm NAND then any other controller. Moving to a new die shrink is not something a drive manufacturer does as a willful decision. When a die shrink happens the previous generation becomes unavailable.