Following the launch of OCZ's Vertex 4 series of Indilinx Everest 2 powered SSDs about a month ago, owners of these drives have just been provided with a real tasty morsel in the form of a firmware update that gives a pretty considerable boost to the drives' existing performance characteristics.
Where HDDs still have the upper hand over SSDs in terms of storage capacity in line of their respective price points, for those seeking out the best of both worlds and cost not being of primary concern, OCZ has just been confirmed to have updated its consumer level Octane series of SSDs with a new 1TB variant that remains 2.5-inch in size and sports the SATA 6Gb/s interface.
We saw an early preview of OCZ's Vertex 4 back at CeBIT, nearly a month ago now and it seems like OCZ has decided that it was time to launch its new SSD series. The interesting part here is the controller used, namely the Indilinx Everest 2 which is something of an in-house solution considering OCZ owns Indilinx.
SSD drives undoubtedly are extremely fast, with their speeds being only limited by the bandwidth of the SATA bus interface. However they also remain disproportionately expensive per GB when compared to mechanical drives, forbidding mainstream customers from purchasing large capacity drives. For those who require a fairly large primary drive and want to reap the benefits of SSD technology, several companies developed caching solutions, such as the Synapse which we reviewed several weeks ago. OCZ however offers another interesting product, the RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB. The RevoDrive Hybrid is a ready-to-go storage solution which couples a 1TB mechanical drive with a 128GB SSD cache in the form of a PCI-E device. In this review we will find out not only how well it compares against SSD drives but when compared to other caching solutions as well.
It was a year ago when OCZ decided to acquire Indilinx, a major designer and manufacturer of SSD drive controllers, revealing the company’s medium-to-long term business plan to focus a large percentage of their operations on the SSD drives market. Today we are going to examine the fruits of that merger by testing and reviewing the Octane, the first Indilinx-based drive which found its way into our labs after Indilinx was acquired by OCZ.
Last week OCZ announced that it was going to be showing off its Indilinx Everest 2 based Vertex 4 SSD at CeBIT and the company did indeed have a couple of units up and running at the show. What we're not so sure about is the so called industry leading performance that the press release was talking about, but it's by no means a sloth.
"What if I have about US$5000 to spend - Could I have a true 8-core/16-thread CPU in a small form factor setup without compromising on storage, thermals or online gaming prowess?"
Well, we show that we can!
Cebit might not be the most prominent IT show these days, but it doesn't stop companies from announcing new products at the show and that's just what OCZ has said it will be doing. The company is getting ready to unveil its Vertex 4 series of SSDs based on its new Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller which should prove to be competitive against SandForce's 2000-series of controllers.
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The Japanese market has become the first to learn of two new Agility 3 series solid state drives on the horizon - a 180GB and 360GB model. Looking at the Agility 3 product page on OCZ's website confirms the two additional variants with their respective part numbers listed.
With the shortage of mechanical disks and the constant price reductions of flash memory, 2012 turned into the year of Solid State Drive war. One of the major contestants in this war is definitely OCZ and one of their greatest weapons is the 3rd generation of their Agility series drives. The company ranks the Agility 3 series as “mainstream performance” drives, designed to balance performance and value for enthusiasts who want to migrate to SSD technology without breaking the bank. Interestingly enough, the Agility III series drive features a SATA III interface and boast speeds that could be trouble for the high performance series of every manufacturer. We will see just how fast these mainstream SSD drives are in this review.
PC Power & Cooling is a company both well known and favored among enthusiasts for their high performance power supplies. Although the company had been acquired by OCZ several years ago, PC Power & Cooling maintained their (at least partial) autonomy and continues their operation to this date, offering a long list of power-related products. Today we are going to examine the latest addition to the company’s products lineup, the Silencer Mk III 600W power supply. Is the latest Mk III version a worthy continuer of the legendary Silencer series? We will find out in this review.
PCI-Express SSD drives are not new in the market, with the technology being implemented in several portable devices and companies offering various PCI-E SSD drives for home and professional applications. One of the first to offer a commercial PCI-E SSD drive in the form of a PC card was OCZ, several years ago. The company today offers several similar devices, two of which we have here today; the RevoDrive X2, successor of the first PCI-E based SSD drives and designed for enthusiasts and the RevoDrive 3 X2, an improved version of the same device for workstation/professional use. Are 2.5” SATA SSD drives not fast enough for you? Then read on…
Even though SSDs are a relatively new technology and market penetration is not yet extensive, demand from performance-crazed enthusiasts has led several of the major manufacturers to release products designed for maximum performance regardless of their high cost. Today we will examine OCZ’s currently fastest 2.5” SSD offering, the Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB drive. As the name suggests, this disk has been designed and tuned to deliver the best possible IOPS performance which current controllers and flash memory technologies allow. How well it can perform in both synthetic benchmarks and real-world applications? We will find out in this review.
The SSD market is continuously growing, yet high capacity devices will most likely not be affordable by the bulk of consumers for several years to come. Even after the Thailand catastrophe which increased mechanical drive prices by as much as 300%, high capacity SSDs were far too expensive to be competitive. Many manufacturers are working on solutions to improve hard disk drive performance without having to use a large capacity SSD; Intel introduced the SRT (Smart Response Technology) n their Z68 chipset, Seagate designed hybrid mechanical drives with a small SSD cache installed and OCZ introduced various solutions, the most popular being a hybrid PCI-E 1TB drive. OCZ however also introduced another very interesting product, an SSD baptized “Synapse”, which has been designed to be used as a plug & play caching solution. OCZ promises SSD speeds while using virtually any mechanical HDD of up to 2TB capacity as a primary system disk. Sounds too good to be true? We will find out in this review.
With Intel's Ivy Bridge based Ultrabooks and a fair few other Ivy Bridge notebooks and desktops expected to offer Thunderbolt connectivity – the first time for computers no from Apple – it looks like several companies are getting interested in the still relatively new, high-speed interface. OCZ has shown off its upcoming external SSD with Thunderbolt interface at CES, as well as its new Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller.
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