OCZ recently unveiled their latest range of Solid State Drives (SSD), aiming to hit the balance between cost and performance. With only a few exceptions, SSDs haven't received a warm welcome from consumers yet - almost certainly due to the cost, as the price per gigabyte is considerably higher than that for traditional hard drives. Only a small handful of major technology companies have entered this new, emerging market, and perhaps for a good reason. However, the new drives could be the start of a push to lower prices without lowering performance drastically either. The new range, available in capacities of 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB is a mixture of good performance (in comparison to existing SSDs, as well as their own range) and value. With read speeds of up to 200MB a second, and write speeds of 160MB, very few SSDs beat it in terms of performance, and fewer still regarding cost.
OCZ's recommended prices for the 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB models are USD $129, $249, $469, and $869 respectively - not enough to tempt those with lower budgets, but, in comparison to Intel's SSD offerings (which have faster read speeds, but slower write speeds), it offers better value for money.
Of course, the latest range from OCZ has the standard features one would expect from an SSD drive too, but the focus is on value for money. Adoption of the new drives has only just taken off in laptops in the last year, and is likely to take longer for PCs. However, regardless of the slow adoption, this is surely a step in the right direction for what could be, and is likely to be the replacement for the traditional hard drive.
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Also do they give you a date of how long (how many writes/cycles w/e) these SSDs can do before they die?
Core v1 (SATAII):
30GB, 60GB, 120GB with Read Speed 153MB/s and Write Speed ~80MB/s
Core v2 (SATAII + miniUSB):
30GB, 60GB, 120GB, 250GB with Read Speed 170MB/s and Write Speed 90MB/s
The problem with these versions is that they have a random write speed of about 20MB/s. Also, when running an operating system like Vista from the drive you may experience stuttering or lag because there is no on-board cache.
These new drives (I thought they would be called Core v3) have onboard cache to remove the stutter and lag effect. They also improve random writes, like the expensive Intel drives. I wasn't expecting sequential writes to be so fast. 160MB/s! Wow!
If you want a cheap drive to boot your OS core files from, then this is the drive for you. I'm pretty sure it boots up XP in 5 seconds or less. Possibly 10 seconds maximum if you include from BIOS screen.
If you run linux it's possible to make a unionfs (like on the EEEPC) and have all files that aren't written much to be put on the fast SSD. All files involved with booting should be placed on there as well. Also make sure to make a RAMDisk (tmpfs) where all temporary files go, such as firefox session files. The speed is just amazing.
Edit: 64MB of cache on the drive. Nice.
Last edited by Sacha on 11 Dec 2008 - 02:02
250GB has no use. Even high definition movies don't need a 200MB/s hard drive.
250GB has no use. Even high definition movies don't need a 200MB/s hard drive.
Hay Sacha, can these SSD drives be RAID'ed?
It is 2xOCZ Core v1 in a RAID0.
When it actually gets past his BIOS and RAID screen to the Vista logo it only takes about 3 seconds to load, login and show a completely usable desktop.
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