jmke

OCZ Core V2 Announced: 170MB/sec Read / 98MB/sec Write

OCZ announces larger, faster SSDs with a built-in mini-USB port for firmware upgrades.

Sunnyvale-based OCZ on Thursday unveiled new Core Series V2 SATA II 2.5-inch SSD drives, offering users speedy 170 Megabyte-per-second read and 98 Megabyte-per-second write times, with much larger sizes. The drives represent a continued effort for OCZ to supply SSD drives to consumers at more affordable prices. While OCZ neglected exact prices from its release, it said that the new Core Series V2 drives cost half of what comparable products do, while offering sizes of up to 250GB.


They announced their Core Series V2 2.5" solid state disks with higher storage capacity and improved performance. The new drives will be available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB capacities.

“OCZ continues the trend of enabling consumers with the latest in cutting edge solid state disc technology with the introduction of the new Core V2 SSD,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “As SSD technology progresses, OCZ will continue to release updated and enhanced solutions to ensure our customers stay on the leading edge. The new Core V2 drives offer consumers and system integrators increased capacities up to 250GB, improved read and write performance and faster seek time, all coupled with a new mini USB port empowering customers with the ability to further improve performance and compatibility by updating firmware in the future.”

Featuring new architecture, the Core Series SSD V2 will be available in up to a massive 250GB capacity and delivers enhanced speeds of up to 170 MB/s read and 98 MB/s write speeds with an improved seek time of less than 0.2-0.3ms, making the Core V2 significantly faster when it comes to both Read/Write and seek-time performance. The addition of a mini-USB port also makes it possible for customers in the field to update the Core V2’s firmware should new versions become available, to further enhance compatibility or performance with future platforms.

Available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, 250GB capacities*
- Read: up to 170 MB/sec**
- Write: up to 98 MB/sec**
- Slim 2.5" Design
- 100.2 x 70 x 9.3mm
- Lightweight 77g
- Operating Temp: -10C ~ +70C
- Storage Temp: -55C ~ +140C
- Low Power Consumption
- Shock Resistant 1500G
- RAID Support
- Mini USB 2.0 Port
- MTBF 1.5 million hours
- 2 year warranty

*Consumers may see a discrepancy between reported capacity and actual capacity; the storage industry standard is to display capacity in decimal. However, the operating system usually calculates capacity in binary format, causing traditional HDD and SSD to show a lower capacity in Windows. In the case of SSDs, some of the capacity is reserved for formatting and redundancy for wear leveling. These reserved areas on an SSD may occupy up to 5% of the drive’s storage capacity. On the Core V2 Series the new naming convention reflects this and the 30 is equivalent to 32GB, the 60 is equivalent to the 64GB and so on.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/304

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Faiakes

That's all fine but I see neither price nor availability.

P.S. I have just bought the OCZ Core 32GB SSD. I'll be installing it in my laptop today and will report my experiences soon.

jmke

An interesting note brought to light by a faithful reader is this little warning on the OCZ product page

IMPORTANT NOTE: Solid State Drives DO NOT require defragmentation. It may decrease the lifespan of the drive.

Defragmentation on normal HDDs increases access times, but since SSD have very low access times, this isn’t necessary;
SSD have limited write operations as the flash memory will wear out; so defrag will increase these write operations and indeed reduce lifespan.

Also OS like Vista/XP which is designed for classic HDDs does a maximum of caching and data rewriting to reduce latency; with SSD this isn’t needed thanks to the reduced access time.
If one could write an OS which is designed from the start for SSD it would be noticeably quicker!

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Faiakes

Is it possible to tweak this feature?

OCZ core Update: apparently I need a HHD caddy and interposer to add the SSD to the Dell laptop. I can't find any (apart from eBay) so I'll be calling Dell on monday to ask for some.

jmke

there are a few registry tweaks to reduce prefetch under XP and Vista yes
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html has it all

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wutske

So it's rather important to disable the automatic defragmentation windows does from time to time ...

jmke

with SSD: yup

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Faiakes

Can one tell how to indeed stop that periodic defragmentation?

Edot: scrap that, I found it.

Faiakes

Ok, this is not worth it.

Turning off AHCI, disabling cache and now ICH7/8 limits the performance too.

I returned my OCZ Core. I'll wait until they're not limited by my laptop's chipset.


P.S. The Core V2 is already on pre-order.

Faiakes

The V2 is already available in the UK

But does anyone know whether it has overcome the limitations of Intel laptop chipsets?