OCZ has launched a new controller, the Indilinx Everest, which will power its new Octane line of SSDs. Two major variants will be available—the Octane and Octane-S2. The former is a SATA III (6.0Gb/s) SSD, while the latter is restricted to SATA II (3.0Gb/s) speeds.
The SSD line’s specs are as follows:
- Dual Core CPU
- Up to 512MB DRAM cache
- 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models
- High sequential speeds:
- Octane (SATA 3.0) Read: 560MB/s; Write: 400MB/s
- Octane-S2 (SATA 2.0) Read: 275MB/s; Write: 265MB/s
- High transactional performance – Optimized for 4K to 16K compressed files
- Octane (SATA 3.0) 45,000 random read 4K IOPS
- Octane-S2 (SATA 2.0) 30,000 random read 4K IOPS
- Industry-low latency:
- Read: 0.06ms; Write: 0.09ms
- Strong performance at low queue depths (QD 1 – 3)
- Up to 8 channels with up to 16-way Interleaving
- Advanced BCH ECC engine enabling more than 70 bits correction capability per 1KB of data
- Proprietary NDurance™ Technology: increases NAND life up to 2X of the rated P/E cycles
- Efficient NAND Flash management: Dynamic and static wear-leveling, and background garbage collection
- Boot time reduction optimizations
- NCQ support up to 32 queue depth
- End-to-end data protection
- TRIM support
- Industry standard SMART reporting
The goal of Octane is to present a balance of performance, features, and competitive pricing targeted at the mainstream and performance markets.
“Until now SSDs have been tailored for specific applications, forcing users into a product which maximizes performance for a narrow band of applications, but is significantly lacking in others,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. “The Octane Series solves this problem by providing the highest level of performance across varied workloads including mixed file sizes and mixed compressible and uncompressible data, all while nearly doubling NAND flash endurance.”
Help me understand, Icrontic!
What does this mean for users? Three words: bigger, faster, cheaper. Usually you have to pick two. Octane looks to give all three at once.
Bigger: Right now, the largest capacity 2.5″ SSD is 600GB—this distinction currently belongs to the Intel 320 Series. Octane’s top capacity will be 1TB, which also happens to be the largest notebook hard drive capacity currently available.
Faster: While not as fast as the OCZ Vertex 3 on paper, Octane is designed to work more efficiently with the historically worst performing data type: non-compressible data. Performance with compressed data such as images, movies, and music should be faster than most other devices.
Cheaper: If pricing works out the way OCZ plans, Octane will cost between $1.10 and $1.30 per gigabyte. How does this compare to today’s pricing?
| 60GB | 120GB | 240GB | 480GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertex 3 | $124.99 ($2.08/GB) | $219.99 ($1.83/GB) | $529.99 ($2.21/GB) | $1099.99 ($2.29/GB) |
| Agility 3 | $94.99 ($1.58/GB) | $174.99 ($1.46/GB) | $329.99 ($1.37/GB) | $699.99 ($1.46/GB) |
| Solid 3 | $94.99 ($1.58/GB) | $183.99 ($1.53/GB) | ||
| Vertex 2 | $97.99 ($1.63/GB) | $149.99 ($1.25/GB) | $314.99 ($1.31/GB) | $1049.99 ($2.19/GB) |
Octane’s pricing is promising compared to their current offerings. That 1TB drive should cost no more than $1300—expensive, to be sure, but it’s also the current cost of several large capacity SSDs, all smaller and some less than half the size.
The OCZ Octane will be released for sale on November 1.
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