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.