VR-Zone

Being in the retail SSD market isn't a money maker and OCZ has been trying to work its way into the OEM market space for some time. Now the company has announced a new mSATA SSD under its Deneva 2 brand that the company is targeting towards Ultrabooks for some Intel Smart Response caching action.

The mSATA version of the Deneva 2 (OCZ is already offering standard 2.5-inch SATA drives in the Deneva 2 series) is available in 30 or 60GB and OCZ claims that the drives have been optimized for Intel's Smart Response technology. It's pretty clear from the small sizes of the SSDs that they weren't intended as a main storage option.

The Deneva 2 drives sports a SandForce 2141 or 2181 controller (OCZ's website lists both options) and are as such SATA 3Gbps drives. The max read speed is rated at up to 280MB/s with the write speed following closely behind at up to 260MB/s. OCZ apparently has a 120GB model as well as the company is also targeting the Deneva 2 series for embedded applications in the enterprise, industrial and automotive industry.

We've already seen Asus utilize mSATA SSDs from Adata, although these weren't intended for caching, but are in fact the main SSD of Asus' Ultrabooks. We're still not convinced that Intel's Smart Response technology is the way forward though, especially as SSDs continue to come down in price whereas at the same time pricing for hard drives are likely to remain quite high for much of this year. So far SSDs seem favourable in Ultrabooks, but as prices come down, we'd expect to see more hard drive equipped models and maybe this is when SSD caching will come into play.

Source: OCZ