OCZ Says Its New Vertex SSD Beats Intel's X25-E
OCZ's Vertex series of solid-state drives has started shipping. That doesn't sound like big news at first, since the company previously announced the birth of the drives at the end of last year. However, if OCZs claims hold up to spec, their Vertex drives will rival the very best of the consumer SSDs, Intel's X25-M and X25-E drives.
The delay on shipping the SSDs came as a result of firmware updates, and OCZ now boasts sequential read and write speeds of 250 MB/s and 240 MB/s respectively.
How's that? OCZ has slapped a 64 MB data buffer on the two high-capacity versions of these MLC-based SSDs: the 120 GB and 250 GB editions. This is in addition to the Indilinx Barefoot controller that powers the data transfer for all drives in the Vertex line, which can address four flash channels at the same time. Intel's top drives can hit ten at once, so it will be interesting to see how this shoot-out amongst these high-performers plays out--cache size versus channels. Of course, firmware tweaking plays into the picture as well, which begs the question--will OCZ's drives be affected by similar performance issues as Intel's alleged troubles?
Don't expect to see similar performance amongst all drives in the Vertex line. The two smaller-capacity drives in the four-drive Vertex series, a 30 GB and 60 GB version, both come with a 32MB cache. They'll be priced at $200 or below, with the 120 GB and 250 GB Vertex drives shipping for $400 and $830 respectively.
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cheepstuff i know everyone wrongly said that 2008 would be th ssd year. but it really looks like ssd will become a common mainstream product by later this year and earlier 2010 now that price/capacity have sharply improved. who knows, it might start seriously compete with HDD tecknowledgy by mid 2011 once we start getting ones with 500-700GB capacities.Reply -
Blessedman I read over the articles about the fragmentation problem of the Intel drives and have only one question... Would a block of the drive be dedicated to look up tables for data saved on the drive? Fragmentation is a problem on spinning medium because of the two factors of rotation and head position, but I don't see how this would be a problem with an SSD.Reply -
AndyYankee17 I think it's different types of fragmentation, SSDs are susceptible to fragmentation like HDDs but it doesn't make a difference because the access times between getting at the different fragments is nearly instantaneousReply -
Mainstream in 2010? el oh el. maybe in 2020.Reply
Its to expensive. Drive size is too small, and they have a shorter life then hard drives. if by mainstream you mean everyday mom and pops Inet PC has one? 10 years from now ... maybe. -
descendency SSDs have been dropping at a 75$% rate for the past 2 years. A 256 gb SSD costs 900$. In about a year (or maybe slightly more), a 1 terabyte SSD will run you 900$. That's going to be 90 cents per gigabyte. Don't believe me? Just look at what NAND flash is doing. Look at how OCZ, Intel, and G Skill are going after the market. What happens when Western Digital and Seagate (the two largest HDD makers) get into the market? SATA 6.0 SSDs will be out in 2010 and will have mainstream pricing. I'd bet on it. If we see a similar trend, you'd have to believe that terabyte SLC SSDs will be mainstream in no more than 5 years. MLC will be mainstream in under 2.Reply -
ACtually it was the old fw that read/wrote 250/240 but due to user pressure that was decreased infavor for more IOps instead of str, since more IOps will boost real life performance when the drive is used as a Os and apss drive ....Reply
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neiroatopelcc If a simple addition of cache improves performance that much, what's to stop intel from stealing ati's gddr5 and slapping 512mb onto each of their ssd's?Reply