14 DAY TRIAL // OCZ has just announced that it has expanded its enterprise solid state drive portfolio with a new 3.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solution that goes by the name of Talos and is built using the company's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology.
VCA enables OCZ to pair together two or more SSD controllers and connects them together via a bridge chip which is then linked to the drive's external storage interface, 6Gbsps SAS in this case.
This technology was introduced in the Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD and its main advantage over a RAID 0 setup is that it enables the operating systems to use the TRIM command in order to wipe blocks of data that are no longer in use.
Outside of TRIM support, the Talos series drives also pack support for native command queuing (NCQ) and tagged command queuing (TCQ).
Sadly, OCZ hasn't disclosed any information regarding the controllers used by the Talos SSDs, but the high-performance numbers announced (64,000 4K random IOPS) seem to point out to SandForce's SF-2500 and SF-2600 chips.
“We have experienced considerable demand for our high-capacity VCA-enabled SAS products, both with and without enhanced power fail protection,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group.
“The new OCZ Talos SSD series delivers the ultimate combination of performance, scalability, and reliability.
“Talos series drives are tailored to meet the needs of most enterprises in a non-customer specific format, including balanced compressed and incompressible data performance and balanced read/write IOPS, all in the highest capacity SAS 6Gbps drive available today,” 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.
For starters, the solid state drives will only be available in a 3.5-inch form factor, but OCZ also works on releasing 2.5-inch units.