OCZ recently announced a new Solid State Drive family called Core Series with a focus on price and availability. The really great about these drives is that they are also pretty fast, which is usually something that usually doesn’t go hand in hand with the term affordable. The SSD technology is advancing fast and over at HotHardware they’ve conducted some quick tests with OCZ Core Series to see how the performance measures up to the fastest mechanical SATA hardrives on the market, Western Digital VelociRaptor.
OCZ Core Series is said to sport a sequential read speed of 120-140MB/s and write speed of 80-93MB/s, which is also proved by the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The read speed is about 8% higher than that of the mechanical VelociRaptor harddrive, but when it comes to writing the VelociRaptor comes out on top (134MB/s vs. 87MB/s peak). PCMark Vantage seems to love Solid State Drives since OCZ Core Series obliterates the VelociRaptor in the harddrive test.
This is certainly an interesting turn of events since it has once again been proved that the SSD technology is catching up, and is moving past, the mechanical harddrives. SSD also have the advantage they don’t get slower as the drive fills up, like mechanical drives have a tendency of getting. Soon, the only advantage will be the price/gigabyte which is currently the big drawback with SSD, but also here it going in the right direction and it’s just a matter of time before things even out.
The OCZ Core Series 64GB model will cost around $260, which is still a lot of money, but a real catch compared to OCZ SATA II SSD 64GB. OCZ’s first generation SSD namely costs three times as much with worse specifications.
