If you're looking for the fastest consumer-oriented solid-state drive (SSD) out there, OCZ has it. The company's 240GB Vertex 3 is a 2.5-inch marvel that's suitable for almost any application, but offers such astounding speeds that you're wasting its potential if you're not using it as a boot drive. The problem? The price. At $499.99 (list), you're paying nearly $2 per gigabyte. But if you're on the market for an SSD and want the most efficiency you can get for your dollar, our Editors' Choice Vertex 3 is the undisputed way to go.

The Vertex 3 utilizes the new SandForce SF-2281 controller, and is loaded with a total of 256GB of Intel 25nm NAND flash memory, of which approximately 224GB is usable once the drive is formatted. (The remainder of the space is dedicated to necessary additional functionality such as data protection and wear leveling.) The drive also supports 6Gbps SATA III, to give you the highest possible transfer speeds when used with supporting hardware. (You're likely to get the fastest rates with newer technology, such as Intel's second-generation Core, aka Sandy Bridge, hardware; we used a Gigabyte motherboard with a Z68 Express chipset for testing.)

OCZ boasts that the Vertex 3 is rated for maximum read speeds of up to 550MBps and write speeds of up to 520MBps. We only saw read numbers that using the ATTO Disk Benchmark: Working with volume lengths of 256MB and a queue depth of 4, the drive hit the performance ceiling at 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB, and came in well above 500KBps on everything else from 256KB and up. We also got a sequential read speed of 501.28MBps in the AS SSD Benchmark sequential read test, and just barely below that (497.7MBps) in the CrystalDiskMark sequential read test. When it comes to streaming data, the Vertex 3 is simply the top performer, though both the 256GB Crucial m4 ($499.99 list, 3.5 stars) and 250GB Intel SSD 510 Series ($584 list, 4 stars) did superbly in these tests as well, respectively earning 418.53MBps and 463.83MBps in AS SSD, and 393.3MBps and 474.9MBps in CrystalDiskMark. (In ATTO, the Crucial drive never broke the 500MBps barrier—it never even quite hit 450MBps—and the Intel drive surpassed 500MBps on everything at and above 256KB, though never getting in the neighborhood of 550MBps.)

The Crucial and Intel drives occasionally nudged past the Vertex 3 in certain tests: The 510 proved the better sequential writer, in both AS SSD (314.19MBps versus OCZ's 248.7MBps) and CrystalDiskMark (328.3MBps versus 281.2MBps), though at 4KB writes in both AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark the Vertex 3 was the champ (73.36MBps versus 68.02MBps for Crucial and 19.17MBps in the former and 98.01MBps versus 91.38MBps and 48.33MBps in the latter). But in the overall-system PCMark 7 performance suite, the Vertex 3 again plowed ahead with a score 5,357 (compared to the Crucial's 5,033 and the Intel's 5,187).

No, the 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 is not cheap; if cost is truly a deal-breaking concern for you, you're better off looking elsewhere. A smaller-capacity (120GB) version of the Vertex 3 is available for $249.99 (list), but you'll sacrifice some of that paint-peeling performance along with the storage space; for better balance, the Seagate Momentus XT fuses a hard drive and an SSD to grant you the former's affordability and the latter's efficiency, and can be had in 500GB models for under $100. But if you want the speediest SSD you can get, the Vertex 3 is unquestionably where you should angle your attention.

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