OCZ Launches Indilinx “Everest”-Powered Octane SSDs

OCZ’s acquisition of the SSD controller company Indilinx is finally beginning to pay off. The company has unveiled its own long-awaited Indilinx-powered successor to the venerable “Barefoot” controller design seen in drives such as the original Vertex, which at the time was the first SSD to go toe-to-toe with Intel’s own SSDs.

Two models are being introduced initially with the primary difference being the choice of interface. The OCZ Octane will feature the SATA 6Gbps controller, while the Octane-S2 will stick to the SATA 3Gbps controller for users limited to just SATA 3Gbps ports and wishing to save a few additional bucks.

The Octane SSD purportedly features “record-breaking access times” and up to a full 1TB capacity within the same standard 2.5” SSD form-factor. The SATA 6Gbps model will also boast the highest sequential read speeds we have seen yet on any consumer SSD with 560MB/s reads, but will still deliver an impressive 45,000 IOPS for random reads. Sequential writes will top out at 400MB/s.

Needless to say, the Octane-S2 model will easily be able to max out the SATA 3Gbps interface. OCZ also isn’t afraid to take a few jabs at SandForce by touting its incompressible data performance, either.

The Everest controller is a dual-core design and utilizes a 512MB DRAM cache. Octane will debut with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities at launch, with up to an 8-channel, 16-way interleaving NAND layout. Latencies are mentioned to fall between 0.06ms and 0.09ms, with 0.1ms the rough average for SSDs. By comparison a modern hard drive Is doing well to have a 13ms access latency.

OCZ’s Octane SSDs will also feature NDurance technology, which is reported to increase “NAND life up to 2X of the rated P/E cycles”, but no specifics are given. As for ECC, Everest is capable of 70 bits correction per 1KB of data. Octane also includes support for AES encryption.

All-in-all, Everest looks to be a very capable contender in the high-end SSD market. Based on previous slides from an investment meeting, OCZ has spent the last five months boosting Everest’s performance numbers and fine-tuning its in-house controller. Specific prices are not mentioned, but we can expect them to fall in line with current top-end SSD prices, around the $1.15 per GB range. OCZ’s Octane drives should be available starting on Nov 1st.