OCZ's Octane: Initial Performance Results
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 22, 2011 12:00 PM ESTLast month OCZ finally unveiled the fruits of its Indilinx acquisition: the OCZ Octane SSD. Based on the Indilinx Everest platform, the Octane was to be OCZ's more affordable high-performance SSD. The drive will be available in two versions: 3Gbps (async NAND), and 6Gbps (sync NAND). Capacities start at 128GB and go all the way up to 1TB.
The drive was originally supposed to be available in the channel starting on November 1st. OCZ delayed the launch in order to get some additional testing under its belts. Given the not too distant memories of the infamous SF-2281 BSOD issue, the additional validation time is definitely appreciated.
We just got our review sample yesterday and we won't be able to share the complete review with you all until tomorrow morning. To tide you over however I convinced OCZ to let me share one benchmark graph with you:
In our Heavy 2011 suite the 512GB Octane does very well, hot on the heels of the SF-2281 based Vertex 3. It's actually beyond impressive that OCZ was able to ressurect Indilinx's seemingy dead controller project and turn it into something that can at least (on the surface) hang with the big boys. I have a lot more testing ahead of me before I can really characterize the drive's performance, but this is a very good start.
OCZ is touting incompressible performance as a major advantage of the Octane over its Vertex 3/Agility 3 drives. The controller is more traditional in the sense that it doesn't do any real time data deduplication/compression. The drive's performance is data agnostic, similar to drives from Intel, Crucial, Samsung, etc...
Inside the chassis we get a look at the drive's Indilinx controller and 512MB (2 x 256MB) DRAM cache. Our 512GB sample features sixteen 32GB Intel 25nm NAND packages, each with four die per package.
Check back tomorrow morning for the review!
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Qapa - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Well, plenty of room to improve random reads and writes, for instance.Last generation of SSDs:
random reads: 30MB/s - 60MBs
random writes: 50MB/s - 220MBs
So, PLENTY of room for user experience improvement.
Priorities now, from user POV (not from marketing):
1 - reliability (hard to check, only after some time, and even then as an "educated" guess)
2 - price lowering
3 - bigger capacities (although 1GB seems to be a good move) (and yes, only with lower prices)
4 - faster randoms (no need for anything above sata 6gbps)
5 - SSDs being mundane in every laptop and PCs you buy (HDDs being relegated to home storage and backup)
(maybe even some more points...)
X - new interface (sata 12gbps or whatever)
That said, of course that marketing and some applications (servers, ...) benefit from higher bandwidth, but not really for home user, at least IMHO.
motqalden - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
The people on the site need to quit bashing ocz and ssd reliability. It's like the same 6 people are trolling every single article and jumping at the chance to complain about reliability.Yes there were some early issues with some sandforce drives.
Yes there are complaints on the forums (what else do you expect to see on the forums?)
The bottom line is most of these issues never affected the majority of users, and most have been cleared up.
I personally own 2 OCZ Agility drives that I have been running in raid 0 for over 2 years with 0 problems. Like Mr S says the people with no problems don't see the need to post all the time. Read the feedback reviews on sites like ncix and you will find that the vast majority of people are very satisfied with there vertex 3 drives! Just RMA your bad drive, move on, and quit crying already.
/Rant
Makaveli - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
I think you need to stop being in denial.There are pages and pages at the OCZ forum for proof.
When you start seeing articles about these issues on website AKA anandtech had one its an issue.
Take off the blinders son!
Phate-13 - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
When owners of webstores claim a RMA-rate of over 10% for the OCZ drives. You would say there is nothing wrong with that?Or this reliability research : It might not be the biggest, it's in dutch, but the images are in english and say more then enough:
http://darkstone.tweakblogs.net/blog/6956/ssd-betr...
gamoniac - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link
I have helped a friend built a PC with OCZ Vertex 2 120GB, and it failed after 8 months. My RMA experience was not too bad (less than two weeks) but he was without a functioning PC for the period of time.Case in point, if you have good experience with OCZ (SandForce), then stick with them. I have not. So I am seeking other products.
PS: Trying to save $30 and ending up with 3 - 4 hours of extra work is not acceptable for me. Reliability trumphs speeds every time.
jacknhut - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link
199 bucks for 128 GB is not any cheaper than a competing sandforce 3 SSD. WIth the latest firmware that fixed the random BSOD issue, Sandforce 3 at 200 bucks price point is a major threat to this Octane unless the Octane can surpass the sandforce 3 in performance, which I highly doubt it.billegge - Monday, November 28, 2011 - link
Can you guys at anandtech create a new benchmark called "User Experience" and base it only on perceived feel of the product. So, setup identical systems and swap out the drives and see how each feels then simply rank them in order, or if they cannot be ranked along a single line then rank them under multiple rankings. Forget the benchmark tools.rickdaley - Monday, December 5, 2011 - link
will this work in a laptop that doesn't have an sata3 controller?