OCZ Octane SATA 3 512GB SSD Review

Our review today will be a long awaited look at the OCZ Octane 6Gbps 512GB SSD.

Eight months ago, OCZ bought Indilinx with full intention of spreading their wings in the development of their own proprietary controller based on the Indlinx Everest design.  OCZ has spoken of higher incompressible data performance, quicker disk access as well as better sustained write performance in a consumer driven SSD that will be immediately available in capacities up to 1TB.

The OCZ Octane SATA 3 SSD is available in capacities of 128, 256, 512 and 1TB GB and performance varies depending on drive capacity.  Performance also graduates depending on size and our sample 512GB version has specifications of 535MB/s read and 400MB/s write with 4k random write aligned disk access at 16,000 IOPS.  If that seems a bit lower than one might see it is and there is a reason.  This SSD is meant to be a consumer SSD and OCZ is hoping that the combination of performance, capacity and price will play a key role in Octane sales.

OCZ has gotten away from the traditional look of the ‘cardboard box’ exterior and settled on a new plastic one piece design that opens with a simple separation of the plastic.

There is no need do endanger one self as we often have with the moulded permanent case we see in so many products these days. Yours truly has suffered a cut or two in and also has vivid memories of using these plastic encased products as baseballs on several occasions.

The plastic opens easily and contains the Octane SSD, installation instructions in any number of languages as well as the familiar company sticker.

OCTANE INTERNALS

Without a doubt, the star performer of the Octane is the much anticipated Indilinx IDX300MOO-BC controller.  On each side of the PCB are eight modules of Intel synchronous 25nm NAND flash memory (29F32B08JCME2), each being 32GB in capacity for a RAW total of the advertised 512GB.

Formatting reduces the available user capacity to 477GB and the Octane also contains two modules of Micron 256MB DRAM memory for a total of 512MB of onboard cache.

As of the day of this report, public pricing could not be found. however, OCZ has passed along that their MSRP would be $199, $369 and $879 for the 128GB, 256GB and 512GB versions respectively.  No price had yet been decided for the 1TB Octane and remember MSRP means ‘suggested’ retail price which means prices may drop below that.