As of Spring 2009, the Vertex solid-state drive is OCZ's top performing MLC SSD drive. A next-generation controller chip coupled with 64mb of onboard cache gives this SATA II solid-state disk superlative Read - and most importantly - equally impressive Write performance. The OCZ Vertex line delivers a VERY, very fast SSD to rival the one to beat: the Intel X25-M 80GB MLC drive -- but the Vertex delivers 120GB of capacity for about the same amount of money.

Today, OCZ announced a "Mac Edition" model of the Vertex supposedly certified by Apple. Whether there's special Firmware tweaks involved to optimize performance on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard was unknown till a day or two later: Supposedly the Mac version's quoted speeds are throttled back a bit to better match OSX's drivers. This isn't THAT big of a deal, OCZ did the same detuning to the Apex Firmware to make it perform better OVERALL rather than appease the flat-out fastest of the benchmarking NERDS who are out to shave precious micro-seconds off their trivial geeked-out lives. Regardless, the Vertex is faster than snot, affordable - and most importantly -- it's nice to have OCZ recognize the value in speaking to Apple Computer's ever-growing market share.

Tags: OCZ Vertex, OCZ Apple Computer, vertex mac edition, apple ssd