OCZ Octane 512GB Solid State Drive Review (v1.13 firmware)

Rating: 8.0.

OCZ are without a doubt the leaders of the Solid State revolution, and today we look at the Octane 512GB which is based around a unique Indilinx Everest controller. Hang on a minute, haven't we done this already I hear you ask? Well yes, we have …. however OCZ have totally rewritten the firmware from the ground up to offer a ‘more balanced real world performance'. Well, so they claim. It isn't often we revisit the same drive, but OCZ are confident that the changes they have made are rather dramatic.

OCZ are certainly covering their bases, they have a range of Solid State Drives on the market with controllers from Marvell, Sandforce and Indilinx. Sandforce have been the controller performance leader now for a while, however they do tend to suffer with incompressible data and there have been very public problems with drives being recalled due to hardware issues. In this regard it makes sense for OCZ to offer several complimentary ranges of Solid State Drives. Indilinx Everest is their own controller so they are obviously keen to promote it.

The Octane drives have proven to be a good seller for OCZ, and the latest 1.13 firmware update is meant to offer a noticeable increase in 4kb random write performance. I can't say I had a problem with the 4kb random write performance of the drive when I originally tested it back in December, but as with all things technology based, the hunt for more performance is never ending.

While we could just focus on 4kb random write performance today we would rather run our usual wide reaching suite of software, to ascertain any penalties that the drive has to pay for enhanced small block performance.

We received a brand new drive from OCZ with the firmware already flashed, but if you want to update your drive then be aware that it is classed as a ‘destructive' flash. Meaning you lose all the data on the drive. This has to be handled via Windows using the OCZ toolbox software package and you can't do it if the drive is set as an OS boot drive. The latest 1.13 firmware will remap the tables.

If you have read our previous review of the OCZ Octane 512GB then you might want to skip ahead straight to the performance testing.

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