It’s now 2013 and OCZ has emerged from last year’s difficulties as a company with a leaner, but significantly more focused product lineup. That lineup is meant to establish OCZ as a premium brand SSD manufacturer. There will be three product tiers: Value (Agility 3), Mainstream (Vertex 3/4), and Performance (Vertex 4, Vector, Vector PCIe).
This isn’t to say that all of OCZ’s other products are being immediately discontinued; it’s true that many will be phased out over the coming year, but there will be a couple of products that stick around for a while—such as the Synapse Caching SSD.
The big announcement from OCZ is the Vector PCI Express drive, which is undergoing some final revisions before its release. The new SSD is aimed at workstation users who require extremely fast access to their programs and data. Its use of the Barefoot 3 controller provides consistently fast read and write speeds for both compressed and uncompressed data. The Vector PCIe inherits a number of features from the RevoDrive line:
- Multiple controllers on a single board
- Virtualized Controller Architecture enabling both SMART and TRIM support
- Bootable Windows drive
- Advanced NAND flash management for longer life
OCZ estimates speeds of up to 1GB/s and 140,000 IOPS—about as fast as a RevoDrive 3, but with much better performance across data types. The Vector PCIe comes with a five-year warranty and will be available in 240, 480, and 960GB capacities with pricing in the $1.40-1.70/GB range depending on size.
Oh, and because it’s a tradition: