OCZ Colossus SSD Breaks Cover
The name "Colossus", it conjures up something, well, huge. Though huge could mean many things. Are we talking something physically huge, huge as in something of monumental proportions that might otherwise change the market landscape or huge as in benchmark shattering kind of huge? As you might agree, huge is relative but it's safe to say the folks at OCZ hope their Colossus drive is going to be a huge hit in the market. We've been lucky enough to score some early shots of Colossus in the flesh and surprisingly, it's not quite what we expected. In fact, we were pleasantly surprised.
The reality is that Colossus employs a pair of Indilinx controllers, some associated DRAM cache for each and a dual-drive, custom single PCB implementation that presents a single volume to the system. Behold...
The reality is that Colossus employs a pair of Indilinx controllers, some associated DRAM cache for each and a dual-drive, custom single PCB implementation that presents a single volume to the system. Behold...
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As you can see, Colossus is definitely a tightly packed design and densities are expected to range from a low end of 128GB with 256GB, 512GB and 1TB models. The other mildly interesting thing about the OCZ Colossus is the fact that it comes packaged in a 3.5" hard drive casing, just the thing for those of you who don't know how you're going to mount a 2.5" SSD in a standard ATX style chassis. The Colossus will come in a couple of different variants as well - Colossus standard, which is what you're looking at here and a Colossus 4X, which will offer a pair of the above SSDs coupled inside the single case you see here as well.
Word is the RAID controller that co-joins the Indilinx pair is based on Silicon Image technology with maximum read and write performance of around 260MB/sec. The operative word is "maximum" there. We'll reserve judgment until we get one of these drives in house for testing first hand. In the mean time, with a projected price of $299 for a 128GB drive, it could possibly give Intel's new Gen 2 X25-M drives a run for their money, at the very least from cost standpoint. We'll see what the numbers look like soon though.
Word is the RAID controller that co-joins the Indilinx pair is based on Silicon Image technology with maximum read and write performance of around 260MB/sec. The operative word is "maximum" there. We'll reserve judgment until we get one of these drives in house for testing first hand. In the mean time, with a projected price of $299 for a 128GB drive, it could possibly give Intel's new Gen 2 X25-M drives a run for their money, at the very least from cost standpoint. We'll see what the numbers look like soon though.
