14 DAY TRIAL // It wasn't long ago that OCZ updated its collection of solid state drives, but the company shows no signs of slowing down, having again done something of the sort, using Indilinx Everest controllers.
SandForce controllers may be the most popular SSD chips right now, but others are alive and kicking as well.
Indilinx chips are among the best known of them, thanks to their presence in certain SSD series like the new Octane from OCZ.
More specifically, the company launched the Octane line of SATA 6.0 Gbps drives, as well as the Octane-S2, based on SATA 3.0 Gbps.
"OCZ has reached an important milestone in the development of its own controller technology," said James E. Bagley, senior analyst with Storage Strategies NOW.
"The high sustained performance, even with compressed files, the rapid boot feature and high access speeds using SATA 3.0 protocol puts their controller technology in the major league."
They use Everset controllers (dual ARM cores) and can work at up to 560 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write (Octane) and 275 MB/s read / 265 MB/s write (Octane-S2).
All units are built out of 20nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and even feature AES automatic hardware encryption.
Other specifications include up to 45,000 (Octane) or 30,000 (S2) random read 4K IOPS and capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB, respectively. Prices, alas, are unknown and will probably stay that way until November 1.
"Until now SSDs have been tailored for specific applications, forcing users into a product which maximizes performance for a narrow band of applications, but is significantly lacking in others," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.
"The Octane Series solves this problem by providing the highest level of performance across varied workloads including mixed file sizes and mixed compressible and uncompressible data, all while nearly doubling NAND flash endurance."