News

posted on 15 August 2008 06:25

OCZ has effectively doubled the capacity and tweaked the performance of its Core Series solid state drive (SSD) with a V2 upgrade.

The 2.5-inch, SATA II product was limited to 128GB but can now go up to 250GB. The original Core Series SSD, announced at the beginning of July just six weeks ago, had read and write speeds varying with capacity, and increasing as capacity rose. Now the faster read and write speeds are consistent across the range. V2 read speed is up to 170MB/sec - it was 120 - 140MB/sec - and the write speed is 98MB/sec - it was 80 - 93MB/sec.

OCZ says the access time, it calls it seek time, has improved too and is now 0.2 - 0.3 microseconds.

There is a mini-USB port on the product (pictured above) to allow for potential future firmware upgrades, which is odd because the device will already be plugged into a notebook or desktop via its SATA interface. Why should a firmware upgrade not be delivered through that? If the device is inside the notebook or desktop enclosure than how do you access its mini-USB port? What would be on the other end of a USB cable that plugs into the SSD's mini-USB port? Another PC? Why?

The mini-USB port sounds misconceived as a firmware upgrade route and might be there to allow the product to function as external storage for a notebook or desktop.

The company is also providing capacity levels of 30, 60, 120 and 250GB, ignoring the usual binary number sequence of 32, 64, and 128 which it used for the first Core Series.

Pricing and availability for the V2 Core Series was not provided. However, given that OCZ is still saying it is up to half the price of competing equivalent speed drives, as it did with the original Core Series announcement, that suggests no change in the per GB pricing. The known pricing scheme, ignoring any rebates, is:-

- 30GB at $169 giving us $5.3/GB.
- 60GB at $259 giving us $4.01/GB.
- 120GB at $479 giving us $3.74/GB.

This suggests that, with no new pricing and the existing implied volume discount curve for capacity, a 250GB Core Series V2 SSD will cost $3.5 to $3.6 per GB giving a price range of $875 to $900.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}