This has definitely been the year for SandForce as a lot of companies have plumped for the inclusion of the famous controllers on their latest solid state drives. Among these companies were market leader OCZ who have been at the top of the market for quite some time now and for a company whose knowledge was led by memory based products, it seemed to give OCZ a logical step in the right direction when producing SSD's.

When it comes to other brands, it seems that OCZ and their Vertex range of drives act as a measuring stick in terms of performance and are idolised as the clear benchmark for competing against. With this in mind, OCZ produced higher capacities within the Vertex range and broadened the lineup quite nicely. After a while, a new product was born with the Vertex 2 which we looked at a little while ago and was extremely pleased with and wondered what was next for the market leader

Of course the answer was simple, and therefore the Vertex 3 range of drives were due to come out sporting an improved set of internals, the latest SandForce technology and of course faster speeds thanks to those wonderful internals and the inclusion of running on the SATA III interface. The new measuring stick was in town and it made quite a footprint when it was launched with sequential transfer speeds of 500MB/s + read and write and TRIM support which as we know a lot of drives on the market still don't offer.

Let's take a look at the Vertex 3 240GB SSD to see how OCZ have moved on from the success of their previous models and if they've kept it up with this one.