OCZ Presents Customizable Deneva SandForce SSDs

Back in late March, OCZ said that it would stop making coolers, peripherals and systems, in order to focus exclusively on storage solutions, memory products and power supplies. This announcement was then followed by a veritable flurry of such releases, with solid state drives coming out in the greatest number. Now, OCZ is quite eager to keep this inflow of SSDs strong, which is why it has brought forth the Deneva line.

With the Deneva, the company seems to have tried something a little different from what it has created so far. To be more specific, though the target market segment is still the enterprise sector, the Deneva series has a unique advantage, in the way that it can address a wider number of applications than other solutions. This is possible because multiple form factors are or will be available (1.8 inches, 3.5 inches), as are or will a variety of interfaces (FC, PCIe, SATA, SAS). Customized firmware is also an option.

A more noteworthy feature of some Deneva drives is the supercap, which provides emergency power loss protection and, thus, increases the overall endurance of the drives. As for actual specifications, the SSDs employ the SandForce SF-1500 controller, have maximum read and write speeds of 285MB/s and 275MB/s, respectively (on SATA or SAS 3.0Gbps), a 4k random write performance of 45,000 – 50,000 IOPS and a MTBF of 2 million hours or 10 million hours (for the expensive Deneva Reliability models).

It should probably be noted that MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory is what most of the new units are made of, although SLC and eMLC are also present in several of them. FC and PCIe-enabled models should be available soon.

"Our new Deneva Series of drives are designed to improve performance and are the first to deliver Tier-0/1 Enterprise level reliability, using a range of lower cost flash technologies including eMLC and MLC in processes as low as 3xnm," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Deneva SSDs deliver exceptional price to performance and reliability ratios while giving customers the freedom to design in a variety of interfaces including SATA , SAS, FC and PCIe and an assortment of form factors, giving clients the ultimate flexibility and control to address their distinct enterprise requirements."