14 DAY TRIAL // After conquering a good chunk of the SSD market, OCZ can finally rejoice and celebrate the company’s first real solid-state drive controller, fully developed in-house. We’ll call it Barefoot 3 for now as it has no official denomination.
This chip was completely developed by OCZ’s own Indilinx team and it is not a licensed chip from Marvell like it was on the Vertex 4 and Octane series.
This was a combined effort by the Indilinx guys and the British team that the company has acquired from PLX back in 2011.
As we reported here, Toshiba has managed to create a somewhat artificial crisis on the NAND market and other NAND companies have taken advantage of this and actually increased their production volume.
OCZ itself has been complaining about the recent NAND crisis during the company’s past financial reports as it was a Toshiba customer, but was forced in designing new Vertex 4 models based on the Micron NAND.
Therefore, we’re not surprised that OCZ’s first Vector prototype reportedly uses Micron MLC NAND.
There is no information on the specifications of the new drive, but just by looking at the picture we can speculate that it's a 2.5" drive that will likely use SATA 3 interface.
On an interesting note, the flash memory chips are now branded with OCZ’s own logo.
The new OCZ Vector drive will be shipping in Q4 of this year and we expect quite a few price drops during that period as we reported here.
There is no information of the target market for the new Vector SSD from OCZ so we don’t clearly know what sector the company is targeting with the new drive.
What we do know and we’d like to point out is that OCZ’s own CEO recently said that the company’s following products will change the SSD world.
We don’t know whether Vector will be the next mid-range Octane or the next high-end Vertex 4, but it won’t be too much before we find out.
