Wednesday, March 10th 2010
OCZ Technology Makes Solid State Storage Affordable with Onyx SSDs
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and flash-based storage as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs), today unveiled the OCZ Onyx SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, an ultra-affordable MultiLevel Cell (MLC)-based solid state storage solution designed for consumers looking to take advantage of flash-based storage technology. Offering a faster and more durable alternative to traditional hard drives in a cost-efficient SSD, the Onyx delivers reliable performance without the high price normally associated with SSD drives.
"As new technologies become available, OCZ continues to expand both our enterprise and consumer SSD lines, and one of our goals is to make SSDs more affordable to end-users. Our new Onyx series SSD does exactly that and is a perfect solution for netbooks, laptops, or home desktop PCs," commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Designed to offer the best of both worlds, the new OCZ Onyx SSD delivers the speed and reliability of solid state storage to mainstream consumers at an aggressive price point that makes the technology more accessible to customers who want to take advantage of all the benefits of the SSDs without incurring the high cost normally associated with the solution."
With a sub 100 dollar MRSP the aggressively priced Onyx 32GB SSD delivers an enhanced computing experience with faster application loading, snappier data access, shorter boot-ups, and longer battery life. Onyx SSDs feature HDD-dominating access times, up to 125MB/s read and 70MB/s write speeds, 64MB of onboard cache, and unique performance optimization to keep the drives at peak performance over the long term.
OCZ Onyx SSD drives feature a durable yet lightweight housing, and because OCZ SSDs have no moving parts, the drives are more rugged than conventional hard drives. Available first in 32GB capacity the Onyx state drives are ideal for use as a boot up drive or for mobile PCs and Netbooks as a quality hard drive replacement. Designed for ultimate reliability, Onyx SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time between failure (MTBF), and OCZ also offers a leading 3-year warranty and award-winning technical support with the series, making SSDs a more viable upgrade for users requiring ultimate levels of customer service.
"As new technologies become available, OCZ continues to expand both our enterprise and consumer SSD lines, and one of our goals is to make SSDs more affordable to end-users. Our new Onyx series SSD does exactly that and is a perfect solution for netbooks, laptops, or home desktop PCs," commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Designed to offer the best of both worlds, the new OCZ Onyx SSD delivers the speed and reliability of solid state storage to mainstream consumers at an aggressive price point that makes the technology more accessible to customers who want to take advantage of all the benefits of the SSDs without incurring the high cost normally associated with the solution."
OCZ Onyx SSD drives feature a durable yet lightweight housing, and because OCZ SSDs have no moving parts, the drives are more rugged than conventional hard drives. Available first in 32GB capacity the Onyx state drives are ideal for use as a boot up drive or for mobile PCs and Netbooks as a quality hard drive replacement. Designed for ultimate reliability, Onyx SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time between failure (MTBF), and OCZ also offers a leading 3-year warranty and award-winning technical support with the series, making SSDs a more viable upgrade for users requiring ultimate levels of customer service.
52 Comments on OCZ Technology Makes Solid State Storage Affordable with Onyx SSDs
However, they're not worth the price to me either at this point. I don't need something that can cut seconds off my load times—that's an overpriced novelty to me. Having something that can cut hours off file transfer times is much more important to me, and I can do that with beautiful, inexpensive HDD RAID.
I know I know access times, but I'm at my desktop pretty fast (granted, it's windows XP) on my samsung F3.
Give me ten times the capacity at that price point and I might bat an eyelid.
Let me remind you that as little as a decade ago HDD's were less than 20GB in size and cost a fortune. At least you're not being forced to use them, if you don't like the price then stay with HDD's for the mean time and don't bag on SSD's because they cost more than HDD's.
A recent thread here at TPU also showed that HDDs in RAID can beat SSDs for loading game levels. If requested, I'll look for the link.
So I think "bagging on SSDs" is perfectly valid, and I also believe everyone here is entitled to contribute their opinions, especially when backed up with facts.
I went for the cheapest Kingston SSD that costs 150CAD for 64gb. Even the cheapest version flew. I cannot imagine how an expensive one would feel like. After getting one for my main rig, I just had to get another for my laptop which can house two 2.5 inch HDDs, it's perfect for SSD setup. One boot drive and one storage drive.
It's the seek speed that matters.
102MBps average read, 170MBps burst, 122MBpsPeak sustained for 50% or better of the drive capacity.
Besides, you just engaged in the debate yourself with that "we will enjoy our super fast, reliable, silent, no heat-producing SSD" comment.
i'm not saying that transfer rates completely don't matter, but they also won't tell you how fast a certain drive really is in a real world application. maybe comparing transfer rates for random access 4kb blocks will tell you more about the performance of the drive in question (usually thats what counts on the os-startup or on application launch). try comparing an actual ssd against any mechanical harddrive and see for yourself.
if one needs a fast disk(-array) mainly for storing and moving large files, this disk(-array) has to be large and thus ssds are out of the race because of its price tag.
SSD RAID = low access times and high throughput. Cake and eat it too!
I personally am going to refrain from switching to SSD drives until I can get a decent 120/128GB one for $100 or less. With my current RAID 0 7200.12 drives, it takes about as much time to load the BIOS and RAID Boot ROM, as it does to boot into Ubuntu 9.10 (about 20 seconds total; maybe less). Better, Ubuntu 10.04 promises even faster boot times. Oh, and large sequential file transfers are ridiculously fast! Freakin' EXT4, man (MS needs to stop using the uber-old NTFS).
look at some of the youtube videos - XP can boot in 5 seconds flat with a usable desktop. no more 30 second boots and waiting a minute for all your 'starts with windows' apps to load.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EEy9GPys-0
"Change: Improved ATA8 ACS2 TRIM support"
This is from Patriot's web site!
Sure, it's new tech, but this can be made cheaper. Lots cheaper.
Source
as to why they're all around the same time of booting, that would be BIOS POST screens and such slowing it down.
They're not even that expensive to be honest, from a storage point of view they're horrendous but when you have the option to increase the slowest device (and only moving part) in your computer for less than a new GPU or CPU its just another cost that you go with (this is going on my local prices). I'm surprised you guys don't complain about RAM modules, now those are expensive!
Seriously, SSD's are currently meant to replace Raptors and the likes, for a quickly running OS. What's a Raptor cost you? Let me check...
Velociraptor 74 GB €99.90
Velociraptor 150GB €129.50
That's €1.35 and €0.86 per GB respectively, on the cheapest Dutch shop. Still 3-4 times as cheap as SSD's, and I wouldn't buy a Velociraptor since the difference in speed with storage HDD's isn't worth the money for me.