On site at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas, the OCZ Technology Group (OCZ for short) has revealed to the world its newest portable storage solution, the Lightfoot solid state drive featuring Thunderbolt support.

Encased in a metal shell (resembling that of the OCZ Enyo), the Lightfoot makes use of a Marvell controller, is capable of transfer speeds of up to 750 MB/s and is set to be available in 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB capacities. Unfortunately OCZ didn't say when Lightfoot will ship or how much it will cost.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, and Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today unveiled the industry's fastest and most versatile PCI Express (PCIe) storage system, the Z-Drive R5. The increased performance, reliability, and endurance of the Z-Drive R5 is designed to take PCIe-based solid state storage to the next level for enterprise environments.

The Z-Drive R5 features a jointly developed "Kilimanjaro" OCZ and Marvell native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, allowing for completely scalable performance and redundancy while eliminating the need for a separate storage controller, thus reducing the cost to deploy high performance solid state storage systems in the data center.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that the OCZ Deneva2 30GB and 60GB mSATA SSDs, part numbers D2CSTEMS1A10-0030 and D2CSTEMS1A10-0060 have been tested with Intel Smart Response Technology and have passed the performance benchmarks for the 'While Using' portion of the responsiveness requirements in the 2012 Ultrabook Definition.

"We are pleased with the results that Intel has achieved with our Deneva 2 mSATA products," said Tobias Brinkmann, VP Partner Relations at OCZ Technology Group. "The Deneva 2 SSDs have a very small footprint making them ideal for the slim and stylish Ultrabook designs, and also deliver exceptionally fast bootup and data transfer speeds for a superior instant-on and overall more responsive computing experience."

Leaked last week, OCZ's newest solid state drive, the Indilinx Everest-based 'Petrol' has now been made official and is confirmed to reach distribution channels in the 'coming weeks'.

The Petrol targets 'cost-sensitive' applications and has a 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, 2xnm asynchronous MLC NAND Flash memory (backed by the life span-enhancing NDurance technology), a MTBF of 1.25 million hours, TRIM support, and three years worth of warranty.

Now that the Octane models are out and about, the OCZ Technology Group is preparing the launch of a second line of solid state drives based on the Indilinx Everest platform, the more value-minded Petrol series. Like the Octane SSDs, the Petrol drives feature a 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, and make use of the NDurance technology technology which increases the life span of NAND flash memory by as much as 2 times.

The Petrol models also have 2xnm asynchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory (the Octane line uses synchronous MLC NAND), a MTBF of 1.25 million hours, TRIM support, and are backed by a three-year warranty.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, announces the Talos 2 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD Series, the follow-up to the high performance, high capacity Talos Series previously available only in a 3.5 inch form factor.

With capacities up to 1TB now available in a compact 2.5-inch form factor, Talos 2 offers increased I/O performance and scalability in enterprise storage environments. Talos 2 leverages OCZ Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 technology which implements an intelligent complex command queuing structure with unique queue balancing algorithms to provide exceptional performance. Talos 2 SSDs deliver superior random transactional performance at up to 70,000 4K IOPS and features improved mixed workload (75% read; 25% write) performance with up to 42,000 8K IOPS.

Anandtech posted the first set of performance figures of OCZ Octane. The enthusiast community is looking at the outcome of OCZ Octane eagerly, because it is based on OCZ's own newest high-performance SATA 6 Gb/s SSD processor, the Indilink Everest, the first major Indilinx controller after OCZ's acquisition of the company. It adds to the options available to enthusiasts, between SandForce SF-228x based SSDs, and Marvell 88SS9174.

The [p]reviewer put the 512 GB 6 Gb/s variant of this drive though the site's "Heavy Workload 2011" test suite, in which it edged past Intel SSD 510 250 GB, but fell behind OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS 240 GB and Kingston HyperX 240 GB, both driven by SandForce SF-2281 processors. So far the performance yield looks encouraging, considering that OCZ has managed such performance on a drive with relatively higher capacity. Apart from the Indilinx Everest, OCZ Octane features 512 MB of cache and Intel 25 nm Sync MLC NAND flash memory. OCZ will also introduce a value variant that uses the SATA 3 Gb/s interface and Async MLC NAND flash. Complete reviews of this drive will surface in the coming days.

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.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and power management solutions for computing devices and systems, today unveiled the Silencer Mk III Power Supply Series from PC Power & Cooling. Offering industrial-grade performance and stability for demanding computing environments, the Silencer Mk III provides high efficiency, quiet operation, and features the company's first modular design.

"PC Power and Cooling has always catered to those clients that are looking for both performance and reliability from their power management solutions and the Silencer MKIII PSU continues that tradition and incorporates new features such as a modular cable design," said Steve Lee, Senior Vice President of Power Management at OCZ Technology Group. "This is the first modular PC Power PSU and we spent extra time and resources to make sure we got it right by combining a highly efficient core with Japanese capacitors, a whisper quiet 120mm fan, and the flexibility of modular cabling, all to create the best Silencer yet, and we are releasing this exciting new series in a range of models up to 600W and pricing them competitively, making the Silencer MKIII PSU's the ideal blend of performance, features, and overall value for customers."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today launched the RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS and RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS solid state drives. Designed to deliver maximum throughput in multithreaded applications, the new Max IOPS edition is an extension of the company's industry-leading RevoDrive 3 product line, supporting workstation users that require greater transactional throughput and bandwidth.

The RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS series combines a proven cutting-edge PCI Express architecture and OCZ proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 flash virtualization layer with premium NAND flash components to deliver exceptional 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS, along with increased transfer rates at 1900 MB/s reads and 1725 MBs/ writes.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced certification of the Talos 6Gbps SAS SSD products with Nexenta System's NexentaStor unified storage solution software, and will be showcased together at the upcoming OpenStorage Summit, October 26-27 in San Jose, California.

"We are pleased that our enterprise class OCZ Talos SAS solid state drives have been tested and certified by Nexenta Systems for use with their leading edge NexentaStor software, and together we are able to deliver a seamless cloud-ready virtualized storage solution to the datacenter," said Alex Mei, CMO at OCZ Technology Group. "This total solution will be showcased with Nexenta Systems at the 2011 OpenStorage Summit which brings together storage experts to address key technologies including utilizing SSDs to address challenges relating to virtualization, high-availability, and cloud computing."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), today launched the Indilinx Everest-based Octane SATA 3.0 and SATA 2.0 SSD series, striking the ideal balance between capacity, physical size, and speed. In addition to being the world's first SSD to achieve up to a 1TB capacity in a compact 2.5 inch format, OCZ's Octane SSD series combines high-speed data transfer rates with record-breaking access times to provide a superior user experience and improved application performance.

"OCZ has reached an important milestone in the development of its own controller technology," said James E. Bagley, Senior Analyst with Storage Strategies NOW. "The high sustained performance, even with compressed files, the rapid boot feature and high access speeds using SATA 3.0 protocol puts their controller technology in the major league."
"Until now SSDs have been tailored for specific applications, forcing users into a product which maximizes performance for a narrow band of applications, but is significantly lacking in others," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "The Octane Series solves this problem by providing the highest level of performance across varied workloads including mixed file sizes and mixed compressible and uncompressible data, all while nearly doubling NAND flash endurance."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and power management solutions for computing devices and systems, today unveiled the ZT Power Supply Series which offers consumers performance and stability for gaming systems and desktops. Providing high efficiency, cool operation, and a fully modular cable design, the ZT Series comes in a range of wattage options for users looking for a quality upgrade.

"The new ZT power supply is designed with quality components and rich features including a fully modular design for easy configuration and superior airflow within desktops," said Steve Lee, Senior VP and General Manager of Power Management at OCZ Technology Group. "This ZT PSU Series delivers clean and efficient power with the flexibility of modular cabling all at a competitive price point making it an ideal choice for mainstream consumers."

Finally a fix for the BSOD/disconnect bug that has been plaguing users for months is available for SF-2200 based SSDs. OCZ uses these, has been testing this new firmware for several weeks and now believes that it's fit for release. The new firmware is at version 2.15 for OCZ drives and 3.3.2 for drives that SandForce's standard numbering system. As with any firmware update, it should be used cautiously, all data backed up and perhaps used on a non-mission critical Windows install for a while, for confidence. Note that there may be more unresolved issues and new ones introduced.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today launched the Deneva 2 and Intrepid Series mSATA SSD lineup for OEM clients. These small form factor drives are designed for a wide range of embedded applications including slim servers, tablets, dual drive notebooks, and network security devices, delivering superior performance over hard drives while meeting the stringent reliability, security, and cost-saving needs of enterprise storage environments.

Embedded system designers require small format, cost-effective SSD solutions that do not compromise performance or reliability. Unlike standard drives, OCZ mSATA SSDs are much smaller with no outer housing, making them an easy to deploy storage solution for mobile computing, boot modules for virtualization applications, or HDD caching, allowing for high capacities, high performance, and low power consumption in a very compact form factor.
"OCZ Deneva 2 and Intrepid mSATA solid state drives provide OEMs with the flexibility to address storage and caching requirements within innovative form factors, including embedded and dual-drive devices and blade servers," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "These new SSDs are available in a wide range of capacities and configurations to deliver exceptional scalability, performance, and endurance, all with a compact and energy efficient design."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the UK Design Team and certain assets from PLX Technology, further strengthening the company's global research and development team.

PLX's UK Design Team has built a reputation for designing innovative and reliable system-on-chip (SOC) solutions and the acquired engineering team's expertise provides OCZ with additional resources for controller design. Through the acquisition of the engineering team and the license of intellectual property (IP), OCZ will be able to accelerate solid state drive development, reducing its time to market for next generation SSD products, while also reducing development costs.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today launched its Synapse Cache Series 2.5" SSDs. The new Synapse SSDs are optimized for caching applications and leverages Dataplex cache software to dynamically manage the Synapse SSD in conjunction with standard hard disk drives (HDDs), to provide users with SSD-level performance across the entire capacity of the HDD.

"The industry has shown that it craves the performance advantages that SSDs provide, however, many users still value the high capacities associated with HDDs," said Tobias Brinkmann, Director of Product Management, OCZ Technology Group. "We see the Synapse Cache SSDs integrated with Dataplex software as a big win for a large number of customers who value SSD performance but still require HDD capacity. We are proud to be the first to offer this no-compromise approach to enabling high-performance and high-capacity storage for virtually any PC platform."

OCZ is an established SSD vendor with SSDs of all shapes and sizes, from SATA to PCIe, and even USB 3.0. It's natural that the company would pick up on mSATA, a form-factor that finds relevence in ultra-portable notebooks, and recently, motherboards with SSD caching technologies such as Intel Smart Response. OCZ has two mSATA SSD lines, Strata and Nocti. Strata is driven by OCZ's own Indilinx controller, while Nocti is SandForce-driven.Specifications are tabled below:

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the release of the RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express (PCIe) storage solution. Designed to dramatically accelerate applications and system responsiveness, the RevoDrive Hybrid's superior combination of SSD and hard disk drive (HDD) technology is a revolutionary step forward for high-performance, economical storage.

The RevoDrive Hybrid integrates the benefits of both SSD and HDD technology into a single solution to offer both enhanced responsiveness and ample storage capacity. The drive comes bundled with Dataplex caching software which dynamically manages the use of the 100GB SSD with the 1TB HDD for superior overall storage performance. This combination creates an environment where the most frequently used "hot" data stays on the ultra-fast SSD, while the "cold" data remains on the larger capacity HDD. Advanced caching algorithms learn user behavior and adapt storage policies to ensure optimal performance for each individual user, maximizing productivity for the most demanded programs and applications.In addition, the drive not only eliminates the SATA bottleneck unleashing ground-breaking bandwidth up to 910 MB/s, but also features up to 120,000 IOPS (4K random write) for high transactional workloads delivering true SSD-level performance. Finally, the RevoDrive Hybrid provides unique benefits to users by incorporating features of OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0.

"The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy to deploy PCIe storage drive," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "Leveraging Dataplex software to efficiently manage frequently accessed data delivers superior performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive Hybrid the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation."

The all-new OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB comes backed by a three-year warranty and will be available worldwide for an MSRP of $499.99, delivering the industry's best price per GB for SSD-level performance.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the release of Z-Drive Revision 4 (R4) PCI Express (PCIe) storage solutions designed to dramatically accelerate enterprise applications and significantly reduce total cost of ownership in the data center. The Z-Drive R4 product line features OCZ's second generation proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0, providing the utmost in performance, flexibility, durability and enhanced reliability features, allowing data centers, for the first time, to rely on a PCIe-based SSD as their primary tier one storage solution.

"Objective Analysis forecasts that the PCIe interface will become dominant in the enterprise SSD market in 2012, with unit shipments greater than the combined shipments of its SAS and Fibre Channel counterparts," said SSD analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis. "This is because the PCIe interface puts less drag on the NAND-to-processor communication channel than do standard HDD interfaces. By 2015, Objective Analysis expects well over two million PCIe SSDs to ship, a number larger than all of the SATA SSDs that shipped in 2010."

Once a PC enthusiast-centric company, OCZ is taking the solid state drive business seriously, across all market segments, consumer-thru-enterprise. The company now has SSDs in nearly all form-factors, making use of nearly all industry standard interfaces, it even has its own high-bandwidth interface modelled. Some of its highest performance SSDs are in the PCI-Express addon card form-factor, that include SSDs with transfer rates well within the gigabyte per second range.

OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen will be holding a conference call with the press later today, in which he will be talking about the company's enterprise SSD business, and unveil a new PCI-Express SSD, called Z-Drive R4. Z-Drive is OCZ's enterprise PCI-E SSD targeted at systems in which throughput is everything. The Z-Drive R4 was spotted at this year's Computex event, it is essentially a PCI-Express 2.0 x8 addon card that has an 8-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, driving eight, yes, eight SSD subunits in RAID 0. Each subunit consists of a SandForce SF-2281 controller with its own NAND flash memory. As with all compound SSDs, the RAID 0 volume is completely abstract to the host machine.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today released a refresh of the Talos Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gb/s SSDs with OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0. Designed for enterprise applications with mixed workloads, the Talos Series with VCA 2.0 delivers even greater performance for SAS-based storage infrastructures.

OCZ's Talos with VCA 2.0 technology provides customers with a robust enterprise feature-set while substantially increasing mixed workload performance. Talos now utilizes VCA 2.0's unique command queuing and queue balance algorithms to address the demands of today's I/O intensive enterprise applications, which require high levels of sustained IOPS and bandwidth, across file sizes and read/write ratios. While traditional SAS SSDs can only perform one read or write at a time, OCZ Talos drives with VCA 2.0, can read and write simultaneously, substantially increasing performance.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and power supplies for computing devices and systems, announces the ZS Power Supply Series that offer consumers superior value for home desktops and gaming systems. Providing high efficiency, cool operation, and a compact case design, the ZS Series offers an excellent price point for system builders looking for a quality upgrade in a variety of power options.

"The new ZS line of power supplies provides customers with the ideal blend of quality, performance, and efficiency for power hungry desktops," said Steve Lee, Senior Vice President of Power Management at OCZ Technology Group. "The ZS power supplies are available in a range of wattages and are engineered for consumers seeking both solid performance and reliability at a very cost-effective price point."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today unveiled the Indilinx Everest SATA 3.0 SSD platform. The Everest platform features support of 6Gbps interface speeds, high transactional performance that is optimized for compressed files, and maximum capacities up to 1TB.

"The new Indilinx Everest platform is a complete customizable solution that delivers superior storage performance, features, and capabilities designed to exceed the needs of the most demanding SSD applications," said Bumsoo Kim, President of Indilinx. "Combining a 6Gbps SATA Revision 3.0 host interface, a dual-core CPU, and support for the latest, most advanced NAND Flash memory technology available, Everest offers SSD manufacturers unparallel flexibility in optimizing their designs for both performance and cost."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today launched the RevoDrive 3 and RevoDrive 3 X2 lineup of SSDs. Designed to deliver maximum throughput in multithreaded applications, the new RevoDrive 3 incorporates an advanced data management feature-set based on OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology, providing both the performance and features required by the intensive workloads common in high performance computing and workstation environments.

The RevoDrive 3 provides unique benefits to users by incorporating features from the VCA 2.0 flash virtualization software that allow certain direct memory access (DMA) and data management functions. Included in this feature-set are OCZ's exclusive command queuing and queue balancing algorithms, which can be handled by the onboard processing core for higher performance and reduced burden on the host resources. VCA 2.0 is also the only virtualization layer in the industry with TRIM and SCSI unmap support to enhance sustained performance and provide greater endurance by significantly reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection. Furthermore, VCA also offers consolidated SMART support and provides system administrators with advanced features for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting device attributes.