CES 2012: OCZ Showcases Everest 2 SSD Controller

Two months after the introduction of its fist in-house developed SSD controller, the SATA 6Gbps Indilinx Everest, OCZ has announced that it prepares a successor for this processor that will deliver improved random read/write performance.

The new controller, dubbed the Everest 2, is already in development for quite some time now and at this year’s CES, OCZ has brought some SSDs powered by this IC to showcase its power.

These drives, which use not only the Everest 2 SSD processor but also a new firmware architecture, should be able to reach sequential read speeds of about 550MB/s, while writes are estimated to surpass 500MB/s.

The biggest performance improvement won’t be however witnessed until we take a look at the drive’s 4K random performance, where it should manage to reach 90K IOPS (input/output operations per second).

This is quite a large improvement when compared to the first generation Everest controller, which didn’t surpass the 20K write IOPS mark.

From what we can tell from the pictures provided, OCZ will pair the Everest 2 with 2x nm-class MLC Flash memory chips fabricated by IMFT and will keep the 512MB of DRAM cache used in the first iteration of the IC.

So far, OCZ hasn’t provided any more details about the Everest 2, outside of the fact that this is expected to launch in six months from now.

According to AnandTech, both the Everest 2 controller and its successor, will coexist in the market for a period of time, but the former will be targeting the high-end market unlike its smaller brother that will be used in mainstream solid state drives.

No word on the supported capacities just yet, but more info should be made available in the coming months as we get nearer to the Everest 2 launch.