We've been waiting a long while for the full fruits of the marriage of SSD manufacturers OCZ and memory controller creators Indilinx - but with the new OCZ Vector they're producing a drive that's all theirs.
The last Vertex 4 solid state drive came with the Indilinx Barefoot 2 controller on its boards, but, while it could claim ownership of the firmware it was running, the silicon itself was very much Marvell-infused. Still, that SSD remains one of my absolute favourite drives, and is still more than relevant now - especially when you can pick up one of the 256GB flavours for just £155.
Thanks to the OCZ own-brand firmware it runs quicker than any other SSD running the same basic silicon.
OCZ have gone a step further with the new Vector series of solid state drives and are proud to announce that the new Barefoot 3 controller is all their own handy-work. It's built in a dual-core configuration, with an ARM Cortex processor sitting alongside the new OCZ Aragon co-processor, with support for eight channels of Toggle NAND flash. In the Vector that's going to be using 25nm chips from a joint Intel/Micron venture.
My drive's on its way over the channel as I type, but while it should post similar sequential read/write numbers as the excellent Vertex 4 SSD, it ought to give us slightly quicker 4K random figures too.
That's important because the vast majority of a system drive's work is not done on large files - where sequential performance matters - what they spend most of their time doing is messing around with piddly little files. If it can deal with those quicker, then that should make it a faster drive in more general day-to-day use, like getting games loading quicker.
