OCZ launches Indilinx based Octane SSDs by VR-Zone.com
Besides OCZ's mSATA SSDs, we haven't seen anything based on Indilinx controllers since OCZ bought Indilinx back in March, well, that was until today when OCZ announced its new Octane series of SSDs based on the new Indilinx Everest controller. The new SSD controller not only offers SATA 6Gbps support and of course added performance, but it's also Indilinx first SSD controller that supports 2Xnm flash memory.
So what can we expect from OCZ's new Octane line of SSDs? Well, it's a bit of a strange one, as OCZ has launched two different SKUs, one that supports SATA 6Gbps and one that supports SATA 3Gbps and as such we're getting vastly different performance numbers. As such OCZ is targeting the Octane line-up for both mainstream and performance applications and the performance numbers quoted by OCZ are quite impressive, but more on that in a second. Let's start with a closer look at the Everest controller.
There Everest controller is based on an unspecified dual core ARM processor that supports up to 8 channels of ONFI 2.0 or Toggle 1.0 flash memory at speeds of up to 200MT/s and 16-way interleaving. The controller has been optimized for 4K and 16K compressed files and high sequential speeds. Indilinx is still relying on external caching for its SSD controllers and the Everest is paired up with 512MB of 400MHz DDR3 DRAM. Other features include Indilinx proprietary nDurance technology which claims to increase the NAND flash life by up to twice that of competing solutions, fast boot technology which as the name suggests reduces boot time, TRIM support and background garbage collection, NCQ support up to 32 queue depth and of course SMART support.
What all this adds up to are some pretty speedy SSDs with the SATA 6Gbps Octane SKU hitting sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s making it one of the fastest SSD's out there in terms of read performance. On the write side things slow down a bit with speeds of up to 400MB/s, not quite SandForce territory, but we'll have to wait for some real world benchmarks before we can tell how well it really performs. Moving on to 4K random reads we're looking at 45k IOPS, on par with Crucial's m4 SSD with the Marvell controller, but still slower than SandForce.
As for the SATA 3Gbps SKU we're looking at fast, but far from mind blowing performance with a sequential read performance of 275MB/s and write performance of 265MB/s, enough to beat off Intel's 320-series with ease. The 4K random write performance should reach up to 30k IOPS, again better than Intel, but not something that'll set anyone's world on fire.
OCZ will be offering both SKUs in sizes from 128GB to 1TB, but the maximum performance should already have been reached with the 128GB models due to the way the Everest controller works. OCZ hasn't gone out with official pricing as yet, but estimations of between US$1.10 and US$1.30 per GB is expected for the Octane series.
Source:
OCZ,
Anandtech
OCZ launches Indilinx based Octane SSDs
Reply With Quote
Posting Permissions
