OCZ Adds 1 TB Capacity to Octane Series

[btarunr]

OCZ introduced a new high capacity variant of its Octane consumer SSD series, the OCT1-25SAT3-1T. Built in the 2.5-inch form-factor with SATA 6 Gb/s interface, the new Octane variant provides 1 TB of unformatted capacity. Based on the Indilinx Everest processor, the drive packs 25 nm MLC NAND flash, and utilizes 512 MB of DRAM cache. It is rated to provide sequential transfer speeds of up to 460 MB/s (reads), 330 MB/s (writes), with 4K read/write random access performance of up to 24,000 IOPS and 32,000 IOPS, respectively. All modern consumer SSD features are present, including TRIM, NCQ, ECC, and 256-bit AES data-encryption. Slated for mid-May, the Octane 1 TB by OCZ won't exactly be cheap.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[dj-electric]

Price? i guess that still cheaper than gas...

 

[btarunr]

I predict US $2000.

 

[christ87]

if that thing cost $2000 USD, in my country i would be 6500 - 6800.

 

[de.das.dude]

:O thats one lakh rupees here.

better buy some lottery tickets

 

[rpsgc]

HTF does the Octane 512GB costs $899 if the Vertex 4 costs $649 ?

 

[christ87]

Anyway it seems like, larger capacity of SSD, would result decrease in RW speed, and in terms of its price tag, its not worth go to for SSD with such capacity, i assume.

 

[Prima.Vera]

arround 1.5K euros...

 

[bobmilkman]

I've always wondered why people buy larger SSDs instead of RAID0ing two smaller ones

 

[btarunr]

I've always wondered why people buy larger SSDs instead of RAID0ing two smaller ones

Because no TRIM over RAID, and write performance will drop like a rock very soon.

 

[bobmilkman]

Because no TRIM over RAID, and write performance will drop like a rock very soon.

Sandforce Garbage collection is quite good, I've been running raid0's vertex 2's for more than a year and more recently agility 3's. Never had any big problems with degradation. And if necessary, you could just secure erase and re-image.

 

[Octavean]

Sandforce Garbage collection is quite good, I've been running raid0's vertex 2's for more than a year and more recently agility 3's. Never had any big problems with degradation. And if necessary, you could just secure erase and re-image.

Yeah, I’m forced to agree there. Although I’ll add that there are SSD units using controllers other then Sandforce that have aggressive enough garbage collection to fair well in a RAID configuration over time. Those who doubt this should read the following article:

TRIM
I don't have and pretty charts or graphs to explain this next part, but I will share an observation I made during my fragmentation testing. When running my fragmentation tool, I observe IOPS drop as the drive becomes more and more overloaded with the task of tracking the random writes taking place. Here the JMicron controller behaved like all other drives, but where it differed is what happened after the test was stopped. While most other drives will stick at the lower IOPS value until either sequentially written, TRIMmed, or Secure Erased, the JMicron controller would take the soonest available idle time to quickly and aggressively perform internal garbage collection. I could stop my tool, give the drive a minute or so to catch its breath. Upon restarting the tool, this drive would start right back up at it's pre-fragmented IOPS value.

Because of this super-fast IOPS restoring action, and along with the negligible drop in sequential transfer speeds from a 'clean' to 'dirty' drive, it was impossible to evaluate if this drive properly implemented ATA TRIM. Don't take this as a bad thing, as any drive that can bring itself back to full speed without TRIM is fine by me, even if that 'full speed performance' is not the greatest.

This type of self-healing (i.e. without needing TRIM) is great for those wanting to run a few SSD's behind a RAID, since no RAID implementation is currently capable of passing TRIM from the OS to the arrayed SSD's. Better yet, considering this drive is tailored to the budget crowd who may very well still be running XP or Vista, it's good to have a few choices that don't require TRIM to maintain decent levels or performance.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...SSD-Review-JMicron-JMF618-Makes-Appearance/Fr

I’ve been running an SSD RAID 0 array for some time now and haven’t noticed a significant drop in performance. The last configuration was a 4x60GB 240GB SSD RAID 0 configuration. Principally using JMicron-JMF618 controller via Kinston SSDNow V Series SNV-S2 64GB units (and one OCZ Agility 60GB).

I think some of the thinking that goes into the idea that performance drops inevitably and quickly without TRIM may have been applicable to first gen SSD units and aren’t necessarily applicable now to modern SSD units. That’s not to say TRIM isn’t a welcome addition if you can make use of it.

Sandforce controller based SSD units can get overloaded under certain circumstances and the performance may not recover even after secure erasing but that is independent of whether it is run in a RAID configuration. Also worth noting about larger capacity of a Sandforce based SSD units:

I noted their 480GB* models are listed as having the same high IOPS specs, which we figure must be a misprint since *any* SandForce 2281 SSD with a capacity greater than 256GB will see a dip in 4K IOPS performance. This is due to the way the SF controller handles the mapping of LBA's. To double capacity from 240GB to 480GB, the SandForce controller's finite number of allocations must be reconfigured to utilize 8KB blocks (up from the standard 4KB - intentionally matched to the NTFS 4KB cluster size). This negatively impacts IOPS performance as a 4KB random write translates to the equivalent of an 8KB random write once the added overhead is taken into account.
If this is a truly hard limit, a 1TB SandForce 2281 SSD would have to again redouble its allocation unit to 16KB and would then be theoretically kneecapped to an again-halved ~20,000 4KB random writes.

*I confirmed the Force 3 and Force GT have specs of 50,000 and 55,000 random write IOPS on their respective listings over at Newegg.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Corsair-Force-Series-3-and-Force-Series-GT-SSD-Full-Review

For what its worth, performance of my 4x64GB SSD RAID 0 array in HD Tune was something like 890MB/s max sequential reads. This is on Intel SATA 3G ports on an ASUS P67 Pro.

 

[ManofGod]

Well, that is just the right size that I could make use of them. Now I just have to wait for the price to be under $500 at least.

 

[Octavean]

Well, that is just the right size that I could make use of them. Now I just have to wait for the price to be under $500 at least.

My last 240GB SSD was $150 after $20 rebate. If I had a total of 4 of them it would cost $600 USD. I would pay about ~$600 for a 1TB SSD (SATA 6G) but I too would prefer it to be under ~$500.