OCZ Octane Indilinx Everest SATA3 SSD Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
886 words · ~4 min read
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Now, this is something that's really interesting and on in this unboxing, I'm
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actually going to focus a little bit less on the product itself and a little
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bit more on the heritage of this
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particular product. So, this is the OCZ
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Octane SSD. This is a SATA 3 6 GB per second
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SSD drive, which means it's very modern.
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Okay. Now, unlike most of the modern
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SSDs out there, this does not
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use a Marvel controller. It does not use a sandforce controller.
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So, what does it use? This is one of the
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few products on the market that is actually unique and proprietary. and
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well I shouldn't say proprietary because it complies to standards like you know
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SATA the 3 um but it's actually unique and different and has a value ad that is
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in some way um separated from what its
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competitors are able to do in the marketplace and I'm going to explain
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what it has as soon as I can get this package opened
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there we go this uses an Inds controller
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and you go oh into links controller I remember those. But no, this is a new
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Ind controller. So, this uses the all
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new uh English uh Indelinks Everest
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architecture, which is an updated Indroller. So, what happened to Ind?
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Well, they used to make controllers on their own, and they used to be the kind
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of top dog. It was Indelinks versus Intel in those days with, you know, J
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Micron having their stuttering issues. And um then they kind of fell by the
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wayside when Sandforce released uh their SATA 2 competitor and then their SATA 3
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drive just kind of came out of nowhere and blew absolutely everything away.
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So OCZ acquired them and they've been quietly working on a SATA 3 6 GB per
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second chipset. So this is the Everest controller and what it does is unlike
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Sanforce and one of the cool things about Sanforce this is what was so
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revolutionary particularly about the first Sanforce controller the sandforce
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controller compresses the data as it's being written to the drive and then
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decompresses it as it's being read from the drive. So that allows it to actually
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read and write more than it's actually
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even reading and writing, which means that the performance of the drive is
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higher than the actual performance of the flash, which is cool, right?
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However, there are limitations to that architecture. So some things that you're
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going to have to work with, some large files are not going to be very compressible. This is called
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non-compressible data. When you're working like a text document, it's very
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easy to compress. But not all multimedia type files. In fact, there's a lot of
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files such as files that are compressed already. If something is zipped already,
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there's not a whole lot more compression that can be done. So, non-compressible
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files perform significantly worse on a
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sandforce drive than they do on competing drives. So what Indelinks has
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achieved here is they've made a controller that is focused on
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non-compressible data which means that no matter what usage scenario you're
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looking at it will perform exactly the same whereas a sandforce drive performs
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better on compressible and not as well on non-compressible data. So hopefully
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that's enough information for you guys. So how how well did they do? Basically
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it is competitive with sandforce on compressible data and beats it on
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non-compressible data. So, I'd say yes, they achieved their goal. Very cool.
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It's also the first SSD that's available in capacities up to 1 TB on a single
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controller, which is sort of an interesting fact, but probably
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irrelevant to most consumers. It uses MLC flash. Okay. It has trim support. It
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sure as heck better. Uh, it has RAID support, which also sure as heck better.
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Ah, here we go. Allound performance and optimized for compressed files such as
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MP3s, JPEGs, RAWs, PSDs, OSX software.
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Interesting. And taking multimedia applications to the next level. So,
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pretty much that's a way of saying what I said in a very long time in like one
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sentence. So, way to go OCZ. Uh, my SSD is faster than your hard drive. Comes
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with a cool little sticker. Totally standard drive. So, it's 2 and 1/2 in,
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which means you got your mounting holes here and here. Your mounting holes here and here, here, here, and here, and
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here. You've got your SATA 36 GB per second interface here. There's your
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data. There's your power. And I think I've said pretty much everything I
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wanted to. This is the Octane 128 gig. And uh as you go up in capacity, you do
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actually get more performance with these Octane drives. And uh thank you for
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checking out my unboxing and first look at the OCZ Octane, as well as a little
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bit of a history lesson, I guess, about the Sandforce controller, the Indelinks
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controller, and how the new generations of products stack up. Don't forget to
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