OCZ Velodrive 1.2TB PCIe Enterprise SSD Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,008 words · ~5 min read
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today will be the most expensive item I
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have ever unboxed on lineus Tech tips by
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a fairly significant margin I might add this is the ocz vlo drive PCI Express
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solid state drive and what makes this so expensive is the fact that it is a
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1.2 terabyte yes a 1.2 terabyte SSD pretty
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cool featuring San Force 1565
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controllers uh that is multiple ones
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let's go ahead and get this party
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started so you can see it comes in a fairly plain brown box it is shrink
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wrapped so we're going to go ahead and relieve it of its shrink WRA
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prison okay
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so this is more of an Enterprise grade solution rather than being consumer
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oriented so no the expectation from ocz
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is not that Average Joe is spending 5 grand on a 1.2 tab SSD for his gaming
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system but there is a market for this stuff so the product does exist let's go
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ahead and take off the cover as you can imagine they don't you know produce a
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ton of these so there isn't like a special box just for the 1.2 tab sssd
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let's see what we got inside here so first we have a lowprofile
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bracket which also includes what else is in here some thermal interface material
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DIY and a heat
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sink all right so we got a heat sink and a thermal
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pad oh okay so it looks like when you put on the low profile bracket the heat
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sink is no longer attached so you have to attach a you have to attach a new one
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there's actually ventilation back here so this must be a pretty toasty card in
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an installed scenario okay so next we have sorry guys
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my battery died got it replaced now and
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here it is the
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1.2 tbte V drive so how many sand Force
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controllers do we have we have one
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two uh three four so this is a double decker PCB much like
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the revo Drive 3x2 products uh they are
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using Intel nand Okay so we've got what
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is this six 12 chips per controller so
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I'm going to go ahead and show you guys the back so you won't see any controllers on the back because the
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controllers for this PCB are in between
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okay so what what kind of density is that so these must be using some of the
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highest density chips out there if we have 1.2 tab so that's equivalent to 4
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240 gigs no hold on 480 no what are
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these things give me a sec you know what I'm going to confess I actually don't
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know exactly what the densities of these chips are but I can tell you that there
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are 12 * 4 48 chips so uh basically what
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it comes down to is how much spare area ocz has left so if you guys remember
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when the vertex 2 originally launched it was a Vertex 2 5100 or 200 00 gig and
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then they had an extended version which actually didn't have any more chips on
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it and those were 60120 and 240 so depending how much leftover area or
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spare area they've left which I would imagine is quite a bit on an Enterprise
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Drive this could be anywhere from the
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equivalent of 4 360 gig drives up to 4
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480 gig drives depending how much left over they have either way I'm telling
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you these are very high density chips and this is a very very serious business
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controller card so here's that heat sink I was talking about before so right
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under there is in all likelihood actually why don't we just why don't we
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just find out what's under there give me a sec all right so since this is obviously
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meant to be user swappable we're going to take off that stock
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bracket go ahead and remove those screws we got one more screw here that goes
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into that top PCB okay so this is a $5,000 SSD I'm
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working on right now
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and we're going to find out exactly what chip that is so that is
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an LSI chip LSI SAS
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20004 I don't know what controller that is okay Fusion
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MPT I'm not familiar with this particular piece right here but I can
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tell you guys right now it is made by LSI so unlike the revo level consumer
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level s um PCI Express ssds which are
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generally using sort of a more of a tier tier three solution this is using a tier
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one raid solution which looks like a serious chip in terms of the horsepower
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that it's delivering because you do have to have this cooler on it you can see
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the other side this one has the thermal interface material pre-applied so
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that'll show you how you are intended to uh assemble the low profile bracket
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should you require it uh it has a PCI Express 8X inter face
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I don't know if I mentioned that before so that's giving you a ton of bandwidth
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between the system and the SSD itself
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and in terms of specs they actually include almost no information with the
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product whatsoever I guess the assumption is that if you're buying one
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of these you already know everything there is to know about it and you're
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fairly certain you need one because if you're buying a $5,000 SSD and you end
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up not needing it I don't know too many retailers who are going to be like yeah
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sure no problems bring that back full refund no big deal so uh there you go
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this is the ocz vlo drive 1.2 tbte PCIe
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8X SSD you saw it unboxed first here
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