If you're like me, you're waiting for storage capacities to increase and prices to decrease before ditching the traditional platter-based hard drive and jumping on the SSD (solid-state drive) train to take advantage of lower power consumption and faster boot up and access times. Having already released the world's first 3.5-inch 1 TB SSD in 2009, OCZ has now removed the capacity hurdle for laptops with the release of the world's first 2.5-inch SSD that is available in capacities up to 1 TB.
OCZ's new Octane SATA 3.0 and SATA 2.0 SSD series is based on the Indilinx Everest controller and feature a rapid boot feature that is claimed to reduce boot times by 50 percent over previous OCZ SSDs. The SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) Octane model offering 560 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write and up to 45,000 random read IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) using 4K blocks, while the Octane-S2 SATA 2.0 (3 Gbps) model offers 275 MB/s read and 265 MB/s write and up to 30,000 IOPS (Input/Output Per Second).
Compare this to the Intel 510 series SATA 3.0, 2.5-inch SSD that boasts read, write speeds of 500 MB/s and 315 MB/s respectively, random read IOPS of up to 20,000 and only comes in 120 GB and 250 GB capacities.
OCZ says technology from its Indilinx subsidiary also provides the new SATA 3.0 and SATA 2.0 drives with reduced latency, enabling read and write access times of 0.06 ms and 0.09 ms respectively. Meanwhile, Indilinx's proprietary NDurance technology is also onboard, which is claimed to increase the program/erase cycles of NAND flash memory by up to two times and minimize performance degradation of the drive even after the storage capacity has been highly utilized.
"Until now SSDs have been tailored for specific applications, forcing users into a product which maximizes performance for a narrow band of applications, but is significantly lacking in others," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "The Octane Series solves this problem by providing the highest level of performance across varied workloads including mixed file sizes and mixed compressible and uncompressible data, all while nearly doubling NAND flash endurance."
OCZ will offer its new SSDs from November 1st 2011 in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB capacities. The company hasn't released pricing details, but Computer World is reporting the new drives will be priced from US$1.10 to $1.30 per gigabyte. Looks like I'll be waiting for a little longer yet to make the switch.
