OCZ Octane: Some Prices Confirmed

[btarunr]

Over the weekend, OCZ's newest consumer SSD line, Octane, quietly crept up shelves. It was released in late October. Octane is a significant product for OCZ despite having successful SandForce-driven lines such as Vertex 3 and Agility 3, because it's the first fruition of its acquisition of Indilinx, a company behind SSD controllers. Octane is available in a wider range of capacities than the other SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" SSDs in OCZ's stable: 128, 256, 512 GB and 1 TB. It does away with targeting the sub $150 market using 80 GB or 64 GB variants, and starts right with 128 GB, priced at $199.99 (an increasingly popular price-point for those building $1500-ish gaming PCs), the 256 GB model goes for $369.99 (a decent price compared to 240 GB SandForce and Marvell based SSDs), 512 GB for $879.99, and we're yet to get pricing on the 1 TB model, it will be released to the market a little later.

Indilinx' latest SSD controller, with the most up-to-date feature-set, the Indilinx Everest, is at the heart of these drives. This is what makes the OCZ Octane a litmus test for OCZ's move to acquire Indilinx at a time when there's no dearth for high-performance SSD controllers such as the SF-228x. Indilinx Everest features a dual-core ARM ASIC, with up to 512 MB of cache (notice there's no overprovisioning by default), advertised speeds of up to 560 MB/s (read), up to 400 MB/s (writes), lowest latencies in the industry, 8 NAND flash channels with 16-way interleaving, and proprietary NDurance Technology that increases NAND life up to 2X of the rated P/E cycles, apart from industry standards such as SMART, NCQ, and TRIM.



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[iLLz]

These sound interesting but I wonder what the 4K Random IOPS are. The MSRP is $1.52/GB and $1.46/GB for the 128GB and 256GB, respectively. Price doesn't seem so bad, especially if you can get them on sale. I can't wait for the day when drives like these fall to under $1/GB

 

[btarunr]

These sound interesting but I wonder what the 4K Random IOPS are.

Advertised 4K random performance is 45,000 IOPS.

 

[wickerman]

$370 for 256gb is pretty bad compared to established models, on newegg right now you can get 240/256gb models for $290/$300. Granted those are the older sandforce controllers that manage about 275/285 read/write. But at $340 you can get an 240gb Agility 3 that does 525/500.

For an SSD aimed at the cheaper end of the market, it doesn't seem a whole lot cheaper right now. Hopefully that price will drop to sub $300 before long..

 

[n-ster]

I was really hoping a better price... With the HDD shortages, it would have helped the sales tremendously

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

What happened to 1.3 gbs a dollar? The 256 was supposed to be $333

 

[Fx]

I am afraid to order any OCZ SSD considering their recent track record

hopefully these new controllers will finally implement some damage control

 

[wickerman]

I am afraid to order any OCZ SSD considering their recent track record

hopefully these new controllers will finally implement some damage control

well to be fair all SF2281 based SSDs had the same problems that OCZ had, Sandforce was the one responsible for fixing the bug. OCZ is their biggest client, so its no surprise they get a bad rap given they have the most aggressive firmware and the largest install base.

 

[AsRock]

advertised speeds of up to 560 MB/s (read), up to 400 MB/s (writes), lowest latencies in the industry

Funny how they go from number to text which makes me think they are not being totally truthful and if they are they should of posted the numbers.

 

[Kantastic]

Are the advertised speeds bloated numbers like SandForce-rated drives are?