OCZ Unleashes Colossus 3.5″ SSD

At Computex this past June, OCZ unveiled an SSD unlike most others. Rather than stick to a simple 2.5″ frame, or toss a whack of chips onto a PCI-E card, the company’s “Colossus” drive is a 3.5″ solution that packs in more than one SSD and RAIDs them together, for insane speeds, and densities. Since then, the drive has suffered multiple delays, but according to a newly-issued press release, they can be in owner’s hands very shortly.

The Colossus comes in four flavors: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. Regardless of the version you pick up, you’ll be able to enjoy top speeds of 260MB/s read and write. Each varies slightly in its IOPS performance and sustained writes, with the best choice for overall speed being the 250GB model, which has a sustained write of 220MB/s and performance rating of 16,100 IOPS (4k random).

To hit such speeds, OCZ has implemented a dual controller design, which essentially turns multiple internal drives into a RAID 0 configuration. Because of this, it would be imperative to make regular backups of important data, as if one of the internal drives fail (this would be ridiculously rare), the data would be truly lost. The company’s choice does boost the performance though, and it’s exceptionally drool-worthy.

The Colossus drives are shipping to e-tailers now, and should be shipping to regular consumers within the next couple of weeks. Curious about pricing? If so, then these are probably not for you. They’re currently available for pre-order at ZipZoomfly, with the 120GB selling for $437.99, the 250GB for $826.99 and the 500GB for $1,530.99. It’s probably safe to say that we won’t be seeing the 1TB version readily available until these prices go down just a wee bit.

“The new Colossus Series is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance and is for high power users that put a premium on speed, reliability and maximum storage capacity,” said Eugene Chang, VP of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. “The Colossus core-architecture is also available to enterprise clients with locked BOMs (build of materials) and customized firmware to match their unique applications.”