OCZ Intros Updated Talos SSD Drive with VCA 2.0 Support

Introduced in mid-May, OCZ's 3.5-inch Talos solid state drives for enterprise clients have been updated to feature the company's recently announced Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 technology, which brings an important number of improvements over its predecessor.

The first iteration of the VCA technology made its debut in the Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD and it allows for two or more SSD controllers to be connected together in order to deliver increased performance.

Its main advantage over the regular RAID 0 setups used in multi-controller SSD drives is that it enables the operating systems to use the TRIM command in order to wipe blocks of data which are no longer in use.

The second generation of this technology builds upon the features of its previous iteration and adds support for the creation of a virtual pool of logical units (LUNs) as well as for the SCSI Unmap command (which isn't supported in Windows at this time).

In addition, VCA 2.0 also supports complete power fail protection, which means that in the event of unexpected system power loss the drive completes all in-progress transactions, protecting the integrity of all active data.

Other functions include support for direct memory access (DMA) and data management functions when paired together with an OCZ SuperScale PCIe-to-SAS storage controller.

According to OCZ, the updated SSDs can deliver up to 50,000 sustained read/write IOPS with incompressible 4K files sizes, and 34,000 sustained mixed read/write IOPS with incompressible 8K files.

"The OCZ Talos Series of SAS solid state drives now leverages our proprietary VCA 2.0 to boost transactional performance and provide a complete range of enhanced features, making it the ideal drop in replacement for multiple hard drives in enterprise storage systems," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group.

"With superior mixed-workload performance Talos SSDs provide clients with increased throughput and flexibility to address their most demanding enterprise storage applications," concluded the company's rep.

OCZ has already begun to sample the first Talos drives and these are available in capacities ranging from 200GB to 960GB.