OCZ Announces Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSDs of Up to 480GB

Some time yesterday, a certain series of OCZ's solid state drives, which hadn't been officially introduced, started showing up on online retailers. This meant that the time when the storage and memory solutions developer planned to make them official was approaching and, sure enough, the day didn't go by without a press release coming out. OCZ proudly showed off its high-capacity Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSDs.

Like all the other products in their respective series, the newcomers employ the 2.5-inch form factor, operate on the SATA 3.0Gbps interface and support the Windows 7 TRIM command, which preserves performance over time. What does set them apart, however, is their capacities. To be more specific, the company unleashed two new drives for each line, one of 400GB and the other of 480GB.

The storage devices will likely show up as options on high-end notebooks. Their SandForce controller can read from the MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash chips, and also write, at speeds of 250MB/s and 240MB/s, respectively. The only feature that differs between the lineups is the random write 4k performance, higher on the Vertex 2 models (22,500 IOPS) than on the Agility 2 (10,000 IOPS).Other specifications include an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.5 million hours and compatibility with Windows XP, Vista, 7, and Linux.

"Solid State Drives have long delivered on exceptional performance and reliability but capacity has been a barrier to adoption for some clients," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Building on our popular Agility 2 and Vertex 2 SSD lines our new high capacity models give customers up to 480GB of storage space allowing them to enjoy all the benefits of SSDs with plenty of room for even the largest applications and files, making this the ideal solution for customers that place a premium on speed, reliability and capacity."

The prices of these four haven't been officially mentioned, but retail listings reportedly set the 400GB versions at about 1,677.50 Euro, whereas the 480GB models come with a tag of 1,733/1,785.50 Euro.