OCZ Releases New Octane SSD Firmware to Improve Performance

OCZ today announced a new release of Octane firmware that should bolster performance. Released late last year, the Octane is the first to contain OCZ’ proprietary Indilinx controller since their purchase of the Korean company in 2011.

The Octane possesses high sequential performance with random performance a bit lower, much to be expected from a companies first entry into the controller business.  Unlike other SSDs equipped with the SandForce processor, the Octane doesn’t rely on real-time compression.

IOPS are a reflection of how many transactions can be performed per second, and is a favorite performance specification cited by drive manufacturers. The Octane firmware more than doubles the low 4k aligned write IOPS for the 128 and 256GB capacities and raises that bar from 16,000 to 26,000 IOPS for the 512GB SSD.

Our own Octane 512GB SATA 3 SSD Review showed 4K write performance in Anvil Storage Utilities (ASU) as maxing out around 14,000 IOPS at a queue depth of 4 (four concurrent requests).  While the performance bump won’t be tangible to most end users, more intense workloads and benchmarks should benefit.

OCZ technology took a big step forward with it’s purchase of Indilinx and this step forward has enabled OCZ to become what it’s contemporaries in the consumer market cannot. In the past, when OCZ wanted some performance aspect of it’s SSDs fixed or improved, it’s had to work through the controller manufacturer, this being SandForce most recently , but also Indilinx prior to that.  Now, with in-house firmware engineering, OCZ is able to change performance aspects of it’s drives using it’s own controller running it’s own firmware.

As with any firmware upgrade, you should always back up your drive’s data first. You could have plenty of time to do so, as no date was given for the new firmware release.

See OCZ Octane Prices at Amazon!