Fasten your seatbelts boys and girls, the SSD ride of 2011 is about to begin. OCZ, who’s been one of the most prominent companies on the leading edge of consumer solid state drives has lifted the NDA on their newest SSD line of Vertex 3 drives. Why is this significant? These are the first drives available with the next generation of SandForce controllers and we’ve got the beta version of the enterprise class Vertex 3 Pro on hand here to preview how it fares in our tests. Specifically, the controller employed is the SF-2582 which promises greater performance than the popular SF-1500 controllers and something we previewed back in October. If you’ve kept up with our SSD reviews, you’ll know we’ve mentioned numerous times how the performance of many drives are hitting the threshold of the maximum bandwidth afforded by the SATA 3Gbps interface. The Vertex 3 Pro won’t have such issues because it sports a SATA III (6Gbps) which should give the drive plenty of room to stretch its legs which is evident from the 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write specifications although there is a caveat to this that you'll see later in the article. The SATA III interface will be a theme this year as more drives are rolled out across all companies.