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Print 30 comment(s) - last by Shadowmaster62.. on Apr 12 at 11:31 AM
New OCZ SSDs are incredibly fast

SSDs are finally coming into their own as storage capacities go up and prices come down. Both OCZ and Super Talent have pulled the wraps off new SSDs today.

The OCZ offerings include the new Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSDs. The SSDs have blazing fast read and write speeds thanks to a new controller. Both drives are capable of up to 285 MB/s read and 275 MB/s write speeds. The main difference comes in the IOPS performance of the two SSDs.

The Vertex 2 is capable of 50,000 IOPS while the Agility 2 is capable of a much lower 10,000 IOPS. Both of the SSDs will be offered in 50GB to 400GB capacities and will start shipping on a few weeks at undisclosed prices.

"OCZ’s original Vertex Series of solid state drives have become a top seller due to the product’s exceptional performance and reliability,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. “The new Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSD lines continue that tradition by incorporating the latest controller and firmware technology. They are an excellent solution for customers who are looking for improved transfer rates and best-in-class input/output per second (IOPS) for a wide range of uses, ranging from entertainment to workstation and tier 2 storage applications. Additionally, this new product line highlights our continuing determination to be the market leader in the high reliability memory and flash-based storage market." 

Super Talent has also unveiled a new SSD called the Value SSD family. The SSD is offered in 8GB to 64GB capacities and has sequential read performance of up to 152MB/s and sequential write speed of up to 97MB/s. Pricing is unknown, but these should be very cheap SSDs considering the performance numbers and that similar OCZ Onyx SSDs are right at $100. The drive uses MLC NAND and uses SATA 3Gbps connectivity in a 2.5-inch form factor.

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Is this a late April folls joke?
By captain99 on 4/9/2010 11:03:57 AM , Rating: 4
"OCZ’s original Vertex Series of solid state drives have become a top seller due to the product’s exceptional performance and reliability,”

Reliability???? EVERY SINGLE VERTEX we've owned has failed and lost data - and that has been dozens of units installed in Dell laptops (E6500) for field workers. If you look at the OCZ forums dozens of threads of similar people with borked drives and loosing data. The OCZ response is comical - "reload firmware version x.yz and it will work again." -- without mentioning you will get corruption and loose data again in the future. Worse yet if you question them on this you get banned from the forum. I have a stack of 60GB and 120GB OCZ's sitting next to me that are worthless.

On the other hand we swapped to Intel G2's for the same laptop fleet and not a single problem.

So if you want blazing fast, cheap, and weekly firmware updates go OCZ. If you want something that performs just as well and simply works go Intel.




RE: Is this a late April folls joke?
By Gungel on 4/9/2010 11:12:36 AM , Rating: 2
Strange, we converted last November all of our office systems to OCZ Vertex 60GB boot drives and we had not one issue. Just finished updating to the latest 1.5 firmware and everything is fine.


By Taft12 on 4/9/2010 12:17:28 PM , Rating: 2
Not strange at all, he has them in laptops and you have them in desktops. Clearly the OCZ drives are not up to laptop-caliber handling while Intels are.


RE: Is this a late April folls joke?
By qdemn7 on 4/9/2010 11:23:37 AM , Rating: 2
If every single Vertex you owned has failed, sounds like YOUR people are doing something wrong.

And why haven't you RMA'd that stack of Vertexes?


By invidious on 4/9/2010 12:14:07 PM , Rating: 4
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, 100% failure rate definately points to a problem with your imaging process or perhaps a hardware conflict with the systems you are trying to use it with.

If you really think all those are SSDs are worthless you can mail them to me. I would be more than happy to try to get them to work.


By sjlee33 on 4/9/2010 1:06:39 PM , Rating: 2
I agree if they really are worthless to you I will take as many of them off your hands as you're willing to give up. I will of course pay for shipping. I'm poor, returning to school after 10 years in the army, so I don't have the money to spend on SSDs but would love to play around with them.


By geddarkstorm on 4/9/2010 3:32:56 PM , Rating: 2
Don't tell me you guys were running Disc Defrag on them.


By tpurves on 4/9/2010 4:34:24 PM , Rating: 2
I've had 4 SSDs in the last year and 3 have failed. That's 4 different brands of SSD in 3 different computers.

Dell mini 9 factory SSD failed after 2 days, RMA'd to Dell.

Runcore PATA SSD upgrade in a dell D430 worked great for 4 weeks and now it BSODs constantly, needs to be RMA'd

Kingston (has intel controller inside) bricked up and died half way through installing windows for the first time. I now have a new one from Kingston sitting on my desk not sure if I will keep it.

Intel SSD (bought to replace the Kingston cause I didn't have time to wait for the RMA) still working fine. But then this one went to upgrade an egregiously slow 4200rpm drive in my 93yr old gradfather's toshiba laptop (go grandpa!) and I don't think he is exactly pushing it too hard.


RE: Is this a late April folls joke?
By nirolf on 4/12/2010 3:08:15 AM , Rating: 2
It seems a lot of manufacturers have problem with SSDs these days (Intel seems the exception). I had a Super Talent (Indilix based) that died on me after around 8 month. ST didn't respond to my RMA request, they've stopped responding to forum posts in their own forum. Probably because it was full with problems. Maybe Anand should pick-up on this and investigate things a little.


By Shadowmaster625 on 4/12/2010 11:31:06 AM , Rating: 2
Provide some evidence or your full of it. Screenshots of your rma's? Screenshots of your banned forum accounts? Screenshots of deleted posts? I wont hold my breath.

Look how easy it is to post a screenshot:

http://grab.by/3HuQ

Are you going to tell me that 700+ 4 and 5 star reviews are full of crap? No, it is more likely that some sad unmentionable company pays you to spew your garbage.


8Gb SSD?
By Helbore on 4/9/2010 10:51:26 AM , Rating: 5
What is the point of a drive with only 8Gb of storage in this day and age? You'd be lucky to get Windows all by itself on there! I thought 30-40Gb SSDs were pushing it for stroage, but this is a bit silly.

Sure, I guess you could RAID a few together, but would it really be worth it? Possibly in a server that doesn't need mass storage, but did the article say these drives were value-oriented, as opposed to performance/enterprise products?

It just sounds like a totally redundant product. Looking forward to the Vertex 2, though.




RE: 8Gb SSD?
By Ristogod on 4/9/2010 10:55:01 AM , Rating: 2
Possibly for some type of netbook or something.


RE: 8Gb SSD?
By therealnickdanger on 4/9/2010 12:10:43 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, remember the first Linux netbooks had 4GB "SSDs", but those were just slow memory cards, basically. 20MB/sec read/write. Effective, but slow.

These new SSDs at those speeds would be quite awesome. I think someone made a comment about RAID... 4, 6, or 8 of those in RAID-0 would make for one hell of a boot/app drive! Impractical, IMO, but there's a customer for every product...


RE: 8Gb SSD?
By Taft12 on 4/9/2010 12:15:01 PM , Rating: 2
My Dell Mini 9 has a 8GB "SSD" which is more than adequate for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I'd love to replace it with something a bit better than a glorified SD card that it is, but 8GB is plenty for all kinds of non-"main PC"-uses


RE: 8Gb SSD?
By dagamer34 on 4/9/2010 10:58:05 AM , Rating: 3
Very cheap scratch disk maybe?


RE: 8Gb SSD?
By Guspaz on 4/9/2010 1:13:04 PM , Rating: 1
For the swap partition or page file? In most cases, I'd rather just add RAM. The cost of DDR3 RAM looks to be as low as $23.25/GB on NewEgg, so the question might be "Do you want 8GB of fast swap, or 2GB extra RAM?" I'd take the RAM.

After all, Linux doesn't even need swap if you've got enough RAM, and Windows is perfectly happy to run with a small page file (I've got 12GB of RAM and a 1GB pagefile), although strange things can happen if there is no pagefile at all.

ZFS can use a solid state disk for caching in front of a storage pool, though, which is quite neat. It's about latency rather than throughput here; a RAIDZ array typically has a very large amount of throughput already, but is lacking in the seek time department.


RE: 8Gb SSD?
By Sungpooz on 4/9/2010 11:19:03 AM , Rating: 3
If it's *insanely* cheap it might be a budget RAID for a boot drive.

It'd also consume a little less electricity than a regular hard disk drive so I'm sure there's a niche for that product.


Indilinx new controller
By Qapa on 4/9/2010 10:44:08 AM , Rating: 2
Does anyone know when is the new Indilinx controller (Jet Stream, which should support SATA 6Gbps) be presented?




RE: Indilinx new controller
By Gungel on 4/9/2010 11:21:51 AM , Rating: 2
Probably not from OCZ. It seems that OCZ is betting on SandForce to power all new SSD's. The Vertex 2 and Agility 2 use the new SandForce SF-1500-Controller as well as the Vertex LE and the lower end drives will be available with the SF-1200 controllers.


RE: Indilinx new controller
By Mr Perfect on 4/9/2010 1:15:50 PM , Rating: 2
Anand reported that OCZ dropped the 1500 from the Vertex 2, it will now be a 1200 for price reasons. Only the LE gets the 1500, which is why it's a limited run.

http://anandtech.com/show/2944


RE: Indilinx new controller
By Gungel on 4/9/2010 7:16:43 PM , Rating: 2
No, the spec sheet shows a 1500 series for both the Vertex 2 and Agility 2. Maybe OCZ changed it again since anandtech's story is from February.


RE: Indilinx new controller
By Gungel on 4/9/2010 7:30:44 PM , Rating: 2
Actually the Vertex LE comes with a modified SF-1200 that has near SF-1500 speed, but will definitely not be as fast as the Vertex 2 Pro with the SF-1500. The Vertex 2 will be more expensive than the LE.


RE: Indilinx new controller
By geddarkstorm on 4/9/2010 3:33:49 PM , Rating: 2
Considering how incredibly well SandForce is performing... I don't blame them!


RE: Indilinx new controller
By Qapa on 4/9/2010 6:15:50 PM , Rating: 2
Well, let me be blunt in disagreeing with you: from what I've seen, OCZ creates and sells SSDs with every controller they can get their hands on :P
(just see how many SSDs they have)

But that was not really the question, specially because, Indilinx will not stop making (good) products even if OCZ wouldn't want them.

So, anyone knows when will Indilinx's controller JetStream come to market?

(I'm hoping it will create some more competition, which might later lead to some prices coming down... and of course I'm curious to see the specs on that controller... will it blow C300 drives to pieces?)


SSDs buggy and unsafe?
By androticus on 4/11/2010 1:06:55 PM , Rating: 4
Hard drives occasionally fail but I keep reading all the time about failed SSDs (of many brands) -- if you look at Newegg's ratings for SSDs, you can barely find any model that has 4 or 5 stars, which for disk drives is ridiculous. I get the sense this entire category of product is a Big Lie -- fast, yes, but tremendously flaky and likely to fail -- way, way more likely than a magnetic disk. And then I read about all the need to update firmware, and the fact that most drives seem to delete all data on firmware upgrade (who as a rule has a complete drive backup/restore mechanism at their disposal???? then who wants to completely reinstall absolutely everything and restore all their data etc.????)

It is very depressing that an entire industry has created a new product replacement without keeping in mind a few of the MOST CRITICAL attributes of the product they are replacing: "plug and play" (no firmware upgrades etc.), *very* reliable, etc.

Also, they are still WAY too expensive -- most people these days would have a laptop with 160G or possible more hard drive -- to replace that costs $500 or more, often almost the price of the entire laptop.




super talent user here
By invidious on 4/9/2010 12:21:50 PM , Rating: 3
I picked up a cheap 30gb super talent drive a while back. My experience has been good and I will definately be interested in the price point of their new 64gb drive.

In my opionion the difference between HDD and a decent SSD is more important than the difference between a decent SSD and a great SSD. People shouldnt be spending $200+ on drives unless the rest of their system was like $3000+. There are better places to spend the money.




SSD
By btc909 on 4/9/2010 2:08:19 PM , Rating: 2
I too have heard of the OCZ Forum horror stories. I'll stick with an Intel SSD.




RE: SSD
By hyperdoggy on 4/10/10, Rating: 0
Raptors extinct?
By DuctTapeAvenger on 4/9/2010 2:11:30 PM , Rating: 2
I think it's time to let my pair of 160gb Raptors in RAID 0 go the way of their scaly brethren, and get some hot SSD action going.




SuperTalent Value SSD controller
By RU482 on 4/9/2010 3:35:30 PM , Rating: 2
JMicron 602B-2




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