Fiscally-troubled storage specialist OCZ has announced its first product to use its in-house Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller: the Vector SSD family.
Acquired by OCZ last year, Indilinx is one of the few companies making high-performance controllers for solid-state storage products. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of OCZ, the company's controllers started to appear on OCZ's Vertex 4 and Octane solid-state drives - but these were merely rebadged Marvell controllers, made a little faster thanks to some custom firmware.
Now, a year on from OCZ's acquisition of Indilinx, the company has finally rolled out some true in-house controller technology in the form of the Barefoot 3. Making its debut in the new Vector family, the Barefoot 3 controller offers high performance and a claimed suite of advanced NAND flash management tools to boost endurance to the point where the drives are specified to survive 20GB host writes per day for five full years before wearing out.
The Vector drives themselves are launching in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities - pointing to a choice by OCZ to not enable the extreme overprovisioning found in some drives to boost endurance and performance at the cost of storage capacity - with claimed performance of up to 550MB/s read and 530MB/s write. Random write performance is rated at up to 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) while read hits 95,000 IOPS. Support for the TRIM instruction set and idle-time garbage collection are also included in the controller firmware.
'These are the first SSD products delivered under the new OCZ and leverage cutting-edge controller technology to deliver a ground-breaking level of sustained performance and reliability for customers seeking a superior SSD for their high performance computing applications,' boasted OCZ's chief executive officer Ralph Schmitt at the announcement.
The OCZ Vector drives are available now, starting at around £120 for the 128GB model and rising to around £455 for the 512GB version. Each includes drive imaging software and a 3.5" adapter bracket.
Acquired by OCZ last year, Indilinx is one of the few companies making high-performance controllers for solid-state storage products. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of OCZ, the company's controllers started to appear on OCZ's Vertex 4 and Octane solid-state drives - but these were merely rebadged Marvell controllers, made a little faster thanks to some custom firmware.
Now, a year on from OCZ's acquisition of Indilinx, the company has finally rolled out some true in-house controller technology in the form of the Barefoot 3. Making its debut in the new Vector family, the Barefoot 3 controller offers high performance and a claimed suite of advanced NAND flash management tools to boost endurance to the point where the drives are specified to survive 20GB host writes per day for five full years before wearing out.
The Vector drives themselves are launching in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities - pointing to a choice by OCZ to not enable the extreme overprovisioning found in some drives to boost endurance and performance at the cost of storage capacity - with claimed performance of up to 550MB/s read and 530MB/s write. Random write performance is rated at up to 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) while read hits 95,000 IOPS. Support for the TRIM instruction set and idle-time garbage collection are also included in the controller firmware.
'These are the first SSD products delivered under the new OCZ and leverage cutting-edge controller technology to deliver a ground-breaking level of sustained performance and reliability for customers seeking a superior SSD for their high performance computing applications,' boasted OCZ's chief executive officer Ralph Schmitt at the announcement.
The OCZ Vector drives are available now, starting at around £120 for the 128GB model and rising to around £455 for the 512GB version. Each includes drive imaging software and a 3.5" adapter bracket.
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