OCZ Octane measures up to SandForce in retail performance

Octane is the first SSD by OCZ with its own in-house circuits. The acquisition of controller developer Indilinx has made it possible for OCZ to develop its own controller design and its first attempt show promising performance in new tests.

OCZ Octane is expected to roll out this Winter and the dual-core Everest controller will get a big 512MB memory buffer that should on paper measure up to market leading SandForce. In the first tests that has been published OCZ has done well and the work with Indilinx has paid off, and if we look at raw performance OCZ Octane is often on par with SandForce’s SF-2281 controller, which has become the reference for most SSDs.

The OCZ Everest controller is not as powerful during random write of uncompressed data, but during what counts as regular use and not the least compressed files Octane is doing very well. After a long series of tests at Anandtech’s lab they conclude that the unit looks very promising for retail usres, but for servers or machines without TRIM support should perhaps hold off a bit.

Octane uses the SATA 6,0 Gbps interface and supports TRIM in Windows 7. By both developing and setting the price of its SSD controller OCZ hopes to be able to lower the price of Octane, and it looks to be on par with e.g. Crucial M4 series seen to price per gigabyte. OCZ Octane 128GB is today listed around 150€, but hopefully it will come down over the coming weeks.

Worth noting is that OCZ Octane will be the first 2.5″ SSD with 1TB of storage, but both availability and price has not been revealed.

We will be looking closer at OCZ Octane and put it against our other drives.