OCZ Releases Vertex 3 SSD With 20nm Flash
OCZ's new Vertex 3.20 is an update of the Vertex 3 SSD and features 20 nm lithography.
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CZ's new Vertex 3.20 SSD is built with 20 nm NAND memory and beyond that is much the same as its older brother. The unit uses the Sandforce SF-2200 controller which provides read speeds of up to 550 MB/s and write speeds of up to 520 MB/s. Random read and write performance are 35,000 IOPS and 65,000 IOPS respectively.
Daryl Lang, Senior VP of Product Management for OCZ stated that "OCZ is always looking for ways to deliver superior solid state drive storage performance and features, as well as making this technology more accessible to the complete range of customers. The Vertex 3 has been a popular SSD series among consumers and implementing the newer, smaller profess geometry will not only extend its life, but enables mainstream users with an excellent computing experience at a competitive price point."
The Vertex 3.20 will be available with a capacity of 120 GB and 240 GB with a 480 GB variant arriving in the near future. At the time of writing, there has been no word on pricing and availability.
Not entirely true. Intel beat them to it by roughly 3 months. The has been available since Q4 '12. BUT, the OCZ sounds superior in both IOPS and R/W speed. Hopefully it's cheaper than the Intel 335 series.
What broken links are you talking about?
OCZ wants to keep going with some third party controllers for their more affordable SSDs. They claimed in a release earlier that it was because they can't afford to be making all of their products on their own. When you think about it, with SandForce compression, the somewhat decreased NAND performance of the new flash is most mitigated by SandForce controllers whereas in controllers that don't use compression, real-world performance would take a greater hit in compressible workloads. OCZ has also already positioned their Vertex 3 drives as the replacement for their Agility SSDs for various reasons, some of which are undoubtedly related to this (Agility 4 demonstrated that using slow flash on a controller without compression is asking for trouble).
SandForce, now owned by LSI, is also probably the biggest competitor in SSDs (Samsung is big, but they're not as *everywhere* as SandForce is AFAIK). Better to make it so that OCZ is not purely a competitor, but also a customer. It can be helpful to be a customer of your competitor. For example, OCZ has a better understanding of their competitor's technology while also being able to quickly switch around to having their best SSDs use it if it ever exceeds their own controller technology.
Anyone who's read much from me on the topic may have noticed that I really don't like SandForce, but I can't deny the practicality of this decision. I do agree that renaming the series with the new NAND flash memory would make sense. Keeping the same name with a new product potentially adds confusion and I don't see that being any good.
I placed a link in my original post and each subsequent post, but Tom's simply removed the link and the words.
"The has been available since Q4 '12." should have read "The [Intel 335 series SSD] has been available since Q4 '12." with the bracketed part with a hyperlink to the Intel website. But Tom's linking is broken apparently.
Oh, that. Sometimes you have to go into the editing section and edit them back in. If you do that, it should work.