OCZ has been an eager contributor to the Solid State Drive market, which has forced them to wrestle both teething problems and poor software support for the new storage medium. It has also gained valuable experience by working with the technology, which has resulted in OCZ Vertex, which through a new NAND flash controller and integrated memory buffer will become the new flagship product. It has now unveiled some new and exciting information about OCZ Core v3 that will be named Apex in stores.
The third generation Core SSD will be given a new brand name and that it has decided to make such a big change to the market is because there are a lot of changes under the bonnet.
OCZ Apex will be the first retail Solid State Drive to use RAID technology in the hardware itself. Apex is geared toward the budget market, but that hasn’t stopped OCZ from fitting it with two NAND flash memory controllers to create an internal RAID array.
It has simply split the memory across the two memory controller that then work in a RAID 0 configuration, which will result in some very affordable performance according to Tony from OCZ.
“So what does this mean in terms of speed? Well it depends on the sata controller on your motherboard but I can tell you I saw 180+ (actually touched 200) reads and 140+ writes on ICH8m (OCZ DIY Laptop), and on my HP Pavillion 9000 which uses an NVidia chipset, I am seeing 140writes and 160+ reads. Now i can’t run any write tests as im actually real world testing this drive every day for 10 hrs, my system here has had 50 to 80GB of data on it at various times over this week while I have been testing… so when I bench it i get what you guys will see..IE this drive is in use.”
Benchmark with OCZ Apex
OCZ Apex will launch soon and we are of course looking forward to hearing more about OCZ’s new budget initiative. Prices will be a bit above the Core v2 series, in other words around $250 for the 60GB model and about $350 for the 120GB model. More information on OCZ Apex can be found over at XtremeSystems forum.
