Now, this is something that's really interesting and on in this unboxing, I'm
actually going to focus a little bit less on the product itself and a little
bit more on the heritage of this
particular product. So, this is the OCZ
Octane SSD. This is a SATA 3 6 GB per second
SSD drive, which means it's very modern.
Okay. Now, unlike most of the modern
SSDs out there, this does not
use a Marvel controller. It does not use a sandforce controller.
So, what does it use? This is one of the
few products on the market that is actually unique and proprietary. and
well I shouldn't say proprietary because it complies to standards like you know
SATA the 3 um but it's actually unique and different and has a value ad that is
in some way um separated from what its
competitors are able to do in the marketplace and I'm going to explain
what it has as soon as I can get this package opened
there we go this uses an Inds controller
and you go oh into links controller I remember those. But no, this is a new
Ind controller. So, this uses the all
new uh English uh Indelinks Everest
architecture, which is an updated Indroller. So, what happened to Ind?
Well, they used to make controllers on their own, and they used to be the kind
of top dog. It was Indelinks versus Intel in those days with, you know, J
Micron having their stuttering issues. And um then they kind of fell by the
wayside when Sandforce released uh their SATA 2 competitor and then their SATA 3
drive just kind of came out of nowhere and blew absolutely everything away.
So OCZ acquired them and they've been quietly working on a SATA 3 6 GB per
second chipset. So this is the Everest controller and what it does is unlike
Sanforce and one of the cool things about Sanforce this is what was so
revolutionary particularly about the first Sanforce controller the sandforce
controller compresses the data as it's being written to the drive and then
decompresses it as it's being read from the drive. So that allows it to actually
read and write more than it's actually
even reading and writing, which means that the performance of the drive is
higher than the actual performance of the flash, which is cool, right?
However, there are limitations to that architecture. So some things that you're
going to have to work with, some large files are not going to be very compressible. This is called
non-compressible data. When you're working like a text document, it's very
easy to compress. But not all multimedia type files. In fact, there's a lot of
files such as files that are compressed already. If something is zipped already,
there's not a whole lot more compression that can be done. So, non-compressible
files perform significantly worse on a
sandforce drive than they do on competing drives. So what Indelinks has
achieved here is they've made a controller that is focused on
non-compressible data which means that no matter what usage scenario you're
looking at it will perform exactly the same whereas a sandforce drive performs
better on compressible and not as well on non-compressible data. So hopefully
that's enough information for you guys. So how how well did they do? Basically
it is competitive with sandforce on compressible data and beats it on
non-compressible data. So, I'd say yes, they achieved their goal. Very cool.
It's also the first SSD that's available in capacities up to 1 TB on a single
controller, which is sort of an interesting fact, but probably
irrelevant to most consumers. It uses MLC flash. Okay. It has trim support. It
sure as heck better. Uh, it has RAID support, which also sure as heck better.
Ah, here we go. Allound performance and optimized for compressed files such as
MP3s, JPEGs, RAWs, PSDs, OSX software.
Interesting. And taking multimedia applications to the next level. So,
pretty much that's a way of saying what I said in a very long time in like one
sentence. So, way to go OCZ. Uh, my SSD is faster than your hard drive. Comes
with a cool little sticker. Totally standard drive. So, it's 2 and 1/2 in,
which means you got your mounting holes here and here. Your mounting holes here and here, here, here, and here, and
here. You've got your SATA 36 GB per second interface here. There's your
data. There's your power. And I think I've said pretty much everything I
wanted to. This is the Octane 128 gig. And uh as you go up in capacity, you do
actually get more performance with these Octane drives. And uh thank you for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the OCZ Octane, as well as a little
bit of a history lesson, I guess, about the Sandforce controller, the Indelinks
controller, and how the new generations of products stack up. Don't forget to
subscribe to Lines Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other comput