14 DAY TRIAL // A long time has passed since OCZ showcased for the first time its SATA 6Gbps Indilinx Everest controller, but the company is now finally getting ready to release this processor into the wild and unveiled the specs of the upcoming Octane-series drives powered by it.
The Octane SSDs will be available in four different versions with capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB, but these all feature the same controller.
According to Nordic Hardware, this SSD processor uses a series of proprietary algorithms for enhancing and providing consistent performance no matter the type and size of the files transferred.
OCZ also mentioned that Octane solid state drives have better performance when dealing with compressed data compared to other drives, but the company hasn't mentioned who these competitors are.
Most probably OCZ is referring to the SandForce-based SSDs available out there, which are known to have some issues in this department.
Moving to the specs of the four Octane drives, all of these include 2x nm-class MLC Flash memory chips as well as 512MB of fast DRAM cache.
As far as performance is concerned, the first thing that pops into one's eye when taking a look at the numbers provided by OCZ is the large difference in sequential write speeds between the 128GB and the 1TB drive models.
In addition, the random write IOPS performance of the SSDs also varies heavily depending on the capacity of the drives.
The rest of the specifications however seem to be pretty consistent no matter the storage space of the SSD.
All OCZ Octane SSDs also come with the company's proprietary NDurance technology that promises to extend the life of the NAND memory chips installed and also include built-in support for 256-bit AES encryption.
Sadly, we still don't know when these drives will start making their appearance into retail, but we keep our fingers crossed that performance will be comparable with that of second-generation SandForce drives as we need another high-performance SSD processor maker in this market.
