OCZ Octane Series SATA III Solid State Drive Review
Our Summary and Conclusion
Performance Summary: The OCZ Octane 512GB drive we tested here performed very well throughout our entire battery of tests. In terms of its read performance, the drive is roughly on par with other high-end offerings, taking top honors in some tests and trailing in others. The 512GB Octane’s write performance is also very good, but generally speaking, it trailed the SandForce-based and Samsung drives we tested. With highly compressible data, the SandForce-based drives were the clear leaders. However, with incompressible data the OCZ Octane 512GB drive led the SandForce-based drives and competed favorably against the Samsung and Crucial drives, which use Samsung and Marvell controller, respectively.
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd also like to talk about some rudimentary testing we performed with Windows 7 boot times and the OCZ Octane (as well as a couple of other drives) configured as the boot volume, with no other drives in the system. Although details are sketchy at the moment, we wanted to put OCZ’s claim of up to “50% faster” boot times to the test. Ultimately, the OCZ Octane was the fastest drive we tested in terms of boot speeds, but it was only slightly faster than an enthusiast-class SandForce-based drive. That claim of 50% faster boots is likely in comparison to older drives, and not current-generation offerings.
The OCZ Octane SSD
The OCZ Octane will initially be offered in three capacities, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB, with prices of $199, $369, and $879. Those prices equate to approximately $1.55 (128GB), $1.44 (256GB), and $1.72 (512GB) per gigabyte, which is competitive with other solid state drives in the Octane’s class. Keep in mind though, lower capacity Octane-series drives will have decreased write performance versus the drive we tested in this article.
Read performance is mostly consistent across the line-up, until you get to the 1TB model which boasts a maximum read speed of up to 560MB/s. Writes, however, peak at up to 170MB/s on the 128GB model and top out at 400MB/s on the 512GB and 1TB drives. The next capacity down from the 512GB drive, the 256GB mode, has a max write speed of 270MB/s.
At their expected price points and performance levels, the new OCZ Octane series SSD seems to be a viable option in the upper-mainstream and high-end market segments. Their feature set is competitive, read performance is very good, and writes, while not as high as some other enthusiast-class drives, are still plenty quick. OCZ has also offered excellent support for their drives throughout the years, and with OCZ and Indilinx now a single entity, we expect support for the Octane series to be top notch as well.
|
|
 |
|
|
;){kind=link}