DailyTech - OCZ Vertex SSDs Delayed

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Jansen Ng (Blog) - January 13, 2009 9:43 AM

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5 comment(s) - last by fteoath64.. on Feb 9 at 8:43 AM

Vertex and Apex drives to beat Intel in performance and price when they finally arrive

Those of you waiting for retail availability of OCZ Technology's Vertex series of SSDs will have to wait a little bit longer. OCZ announced its first drives with 32MB and 64MB of cache on December 9, but has had to put off on retail deliveries due to a firmware update. The drives have specs of up to 200MB/sec read, 160MB/sec write.

During CES, OCZ showed off its Apex series of drives, which have not yet been officially announced. Those are supposed to feature read speeds of up to 230MB/sec and write speeds of 160MB/sec. Both Apex and Vertex are to have wide retail availability by end of January according to an OCZ source.

OCZ also showed off simulations of a Vertex 2 setup with 4 channel internal RAID at read speeds of up to 550MB/sec and write speeds of up to 480MB/sec. At these speeds, SATA 6Gb/s support will be needed in order to maximize its potential.

The first batch of Vertex 2 drives will however ship with only RAID 0 as that will be more than enough to saturate SATA 3Gb/s. Pricing is expected to be higher due to the cost of the internal RAID controller.

An announcement might be made on March 3 at Cebit.

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Vertex RAID

By kensiko on 1/14/2009 1:57:40 PM , Rating: 2

This is confusing:
"The first batch of Vertex 2 drives will however ship with only RAID 0 as that will be more than enough to saturate SATA 3Gb/s."

I think it will be a RAID of 2 drives (internally of course) instead of 4.

I am following closely the availability of the OCZ Vertex, I'm becoming impatient. If at least they could bench one Vertex.

RE: Vertex RAID

By Jansen

(blog) on 1/14/2009 4:18:47 PM , Rating: 2

What OCZ was showing was a simulation of what was achievable, which was a 4 channel RAID setup which would be able to utilize the potential of SATA 6GB/s.

The actual Vertex 2 will ship with RAID 0, which is 2 channels. What is being striped is actually the Flash chips itself, which is pretty cool.

I too, would like to get my hands on one to bench.

Parent

RE: Vertex RAID

By kensiko on 1/14/2009 5:12:04 PM , Rating: 2

I never saw RAID 0 was restricted to 2 drives only. Wikipedia:

"RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails."

Parent

RE: Vertex RAID

By fteoath64 on 2/9/2009 8:43:16 AM , Rating: 2

True. No limit on the number of channels supported only the limitation on the raid controller chip itself. I wish OCZ would do a tri-channel setup to get a 240MB/sec write speed!. I guess that jMicron Raid controller is limited to 2 channels only ?. Pity if so.

Parent

Strange naming scheme

By amanojaku on 1/13/2009 1:57:18 PM , Rating: 3

According to OCZ "Vertex > Apex > Solid"

But I would have gone with "Apex > Solid > Vertex"

1) Apex because it implies "the best"
2) Solid because it implies "reliable, if not thrilling"
3) Vertex because it implies "niche"

Actually, vertex also means "the top" and could be the same as apex, but no self-respecting math person calls the top "vertex!" Still, these drives look nice. Can't wait to see how reliable they are.

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