14 DAY TRIAL // Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND Flash manufacturing technology has become really popular among makers of solid-state drives, and OCZ is one of those makers, having unveiled the Vector 180 line.
Solid-state drives are peculiar things. They started out as questionable alternatives to HDDs, only the sort that had a fraction of the storage and several times the price.
They steadily drifted away from those extremes, though, and they're very, very close to finally striking a balance that will push HDDs aside, despite the lingering disadvantage in capacity.
It's mostly because of the high transfer speeds that they can reach, thanks to NAND being fast enough to take advantage of the full SATA 6.0 Gbps interface.
And not just SATA, but the PCI Express technology as well. Not just in the shape of add-in cards, but also as M.2 or SATA Express 2.5-inch units.
Sadly, most motherboards with support for M.2 interfaces only wire the slots through the SATA 6.0 root complex, instead of PCI Express, so performance is limited to 6 Gbps.
At least that means that the 2.5-inch OCZ Vector 180 SSD doesn't have to worry about being considered obsolete for a while.
The storage device is made of 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND Flash chips, where MLC stands for multi-level cell (the chips have two cells to hold information).
Capacity goes as high as 960 GB, a space that seems to be cropping up more and more lately. Performance is pretty high too.
In fact, thanks to LPDDR3 cache, transfer speeds can go as high as 550 MB/s, at least when reading files (write rate unspecified).
On that note, the random access throughput is of 100,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
All in all, it's a pretty high performance for something that isn't even powered by a SandForce SSD controller chip (currently owned by LSI, soon to be owned by Seagate).
OCZ must have worked hard on the OCZ-Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller processor to match the throughput byte for byte.
Regrettably, we cannot share the pricing details or estimated time of arrival with you because we simply don't have the information. If you represent an interested company, however, you might be able to squeeze the information from an OCZ representative. The OCZ Vector 180 is, after all, a series of storage devices intended for businesses, so the company might be more forthcoming to its potential buyers than everyone else.