SSD Drive Toolkit

OCZ Technology has announced the release of 3,5 ” SSD Colossus series. New line of Solid State Drives supposed to be used in high-performance segment, which requires a large amount of disk space. It is assumed that target audience of these flash drives are enthusiastic and corporate level customers. Senior model has a capacity of 1 TB.

In addition to the increased capacity Colossus SSDs with SATA II interface have high speed parameters due to the internal RAID0 architecture. According to OCZ, the new series of drives are excellent with such tasks as moving small files while working with email, web surfing, file transferring. Test results to confirm this information are not provided, but the specification of the solid sate drives is promising: maximum read speed is 260 Mb/s, write – 260 Mb/s, long continuous recording – 220 Mb/s (for 128-GB model -140 Mb/s).

Series is represented by four models: 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB. Maximum number of IOPS operations (input/output per second) in random write access for 4 Kb file equals to 14280, 16100, 12300 and 13300 respectively. For comparison: for a  160 GB X25-M Intel SSD this parameters is 8600. OCZ Colossus based on multilevel flash memory cells (MLC), has 128 Mb cache and are equipped with two controllers. Other characteristics are: seek time is less than 1 ms, the maximum impact power – 1500 G, mean time between failures (MTBF) – 1,5 million hours. Devices are enclosed in aluminum shell measuring 146 x 101,6 x 25,4 mm. Price of Colossus 500 GB (OCZ refers to Amazon.com) – $ 1770.

Solid state drives are gaining increasing popularity and you can be sure that more and more people interest about purchasing that devices. Enthusiasts will find these drives excellent tool for getting the record results in the PCMark 2005 tests. Users who work with graphics programs will receive significant disk subsystem performance growth. For example Adobe Photoshop starts almost instantly with SSD. Gamers certainly appreciate the increased speed of levels loading etc. In any case, this technology is just interesting.

OCZ Vertex 2.5'' SSD

People from PC Perspective(pcper.com) decided to research productivity of OCZ Vertex SSD. This line of Solid State Drives is based on multilevel (Multi-Level Cell, MLC) flash memory NAND-type. This type of flash memory (MLC) is supposed to have less performance than SLC-based flash memory. Up to 64MB of cache memory is the solution to this problem in OCZ Solid State Drives. In addition, the products are based on an advanced architecture with an updated controller. This controller for OCZ Vertex 120GB is the Indilinx IDX110 chip, and cache memory module manufacturer is Elpida. The main capacity of SSD consists of Samsung chips.

For their tests researchers selected a several more drives to compare:
* OCZ Summit 250 GB SSD;
* OCZ Apex 250 GB SSD;
* Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD;
* OCZ 64 GB SSD SATA-II;
* Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB WD3000GLFS;
* Western Digital Raptor 150 GB.

The main competitor is Intel X25-M 80GB drive which is built on the MLC NAND flash memory. Thus, the memory type is the same as OCZ Vertex 120GB has, so let’s to see which product will be faster. Main infromation is presented below:

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