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We have reviewed many OCZ solid state drives in the last year and today we are looking at their latest Octane 512GB model. There is no doubt that OCZ have been at the forefront of SSD development in the last year, focusing almost exclusively on Sandforce based products. For those of you who have been around as long as me however, you may remember that OCZ were the first company to partner up with Indilinx and today they reaffirm that union by including an Indilinx Everest controller in the Octane drive.
The particular strengths of this drive are based around the NAND durability, which is trademarked under the ‘nDurance' moniker. In basic terms, this means that the Octane drives have a two times increase in rated NAND program/erase systems, for longer life.
OCZ are also using customised page mapping algorithms that help ensure the drive has continuous, stable overall performance with both compressible and incompressible data. The 512GB drive is a 6 Gbp/s drive rated at a very capable 535 MB/s max read, and 400 MB/s max write. Bear in mind, it is important not to confuse this drive with the Octane S2, which is a slower SATA 3Gbp/s solid state drive.
Specifications overview:
- Available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps / Backwards Compatible 3Gbps
- 512MB Onboard Cache
- Indilinx Infused™
- TRIM Support
- Background Garbage Collection Support
- Boot Time Reduction Optimization
- AES and Automatic Encryption
- SMART Support
- Proprietary Indilinx Ndurance™ Technology
- Low-Latency Seek Time: 0.06ms Read; 0.09ms Write
- Slim 2.5″ Design
- 99.8 (L) x 69.63 (W) x 9.3 mm (H)
- Lightweight: 83g
- Operating Temp: 0°C ~ 70°C
- Ambient Temp: 0°C ~ 55°C
- Storage Temp: -45°C ~ +85°C
- Low Power Consumption: 1.98W active,1.15W standby
- Shock Resistant up to 1500G
- RAID Support
- MTBF: 1,250,000 hours
- 3-Year Warranty
- Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 (32/64 bit), Linux, Mac OSX
This is the first solid state drive we have seen from OCZ to be shipped in a plain blister pack, instead of an attractive little box. Thankfully, there is a locking tab at the top which can be torn apart by hand without the need for scissors or a sharp blade.
The bundle is spartan, with a simple overview of the product installation and a smug ‘MY SSD IS FASTER THAN YOUR HDD' sticker.
The Octane drive ships in an attractive brushed aluminum metal chassis with an orange and black sticker on the front and a product specification sticker on the rear. OCZ offer 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB drives in this range and they all operate at different sequential speeds. The 1TB drive is the fastest, rated at 560MB/s read and 400 MB/s write. The 512GB drive is rated at 535 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write. The 256GB drive is rated at 535 MB/s read and 270 MB/s write. Finally the 128GB drive is rated at 535 MB/s read and 170 MB/s write.
Opening the chassis does void the warranty, so it would be best not to do this at home if you buy one of these drives. That is why we are here after all. The PCB itself is also bolted into the chassis from the inside, with four small screws and it is labelled with the OCZ logo, supplied directly from their fabrication plant. OCZ are using fast Intel manufactured 25nm MLC NAND which we have seen in a few other solid state drives this year.
The Everest controller is labeled IDX300M00-BC and supports NCQ, S.M.A.R.T. reporting, TRIM and garbage collection. This drive also uses nDurance technology to handle wear leveling, which will help prolong flash life.
The drive uses sixteen 32GB NAND chips, totaling 512GB raw capacity. Those with sharper eyes will notice multiple Texas Instruments branded chips across the PCB. The Octane 512GB drive uses a 512MB capacity Micron DDR3 SDRAM cache.
On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410
Other Drives (used in Core i7 2600k system above):
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
PCIe drives test system:
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 7
IOMeter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64.
4k performance with Crystalmark isn't that impressive when compared against the leading Sandforce 2281 powered drives, however sequential incompressible based read and write throughput is exceptionally good at 478 MB/s and 387 MB/s respectively. This clearly highlights the strengths of the Indilinx Everest controller.
As we do with all our SSD reviews, we enabled ‘compressible’ data mode, called ’0×00′. The Indilinx Everest controller delivers almost equal performance in both modes, which is something we can't often say about a Sandforce based drive.
Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in recent months.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Overall performance is good, peaking at around 532MB/s read and 370 MB/s write in this sequential test suite, slower than the leading Sandforce 2281 powered drives, but still impressive results.
Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD works with incompressible data and this drive scores very well in the sequential tests, at around 495 MB/s read and 345 MB/s write.
Above, some results from other drives, including the Corsair Performance Pro 256GB, which uses the Marvell controller. The Corsair drive is noticeably faster, especially with the 4k-64Thrd tests.
PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.
The overall score of 4,980 points is quite good, but again the drive scores around 400 points less than the Marvell powered Corsair Performance Pro 256GB drive.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write to measure performance. We also used a 4k sequential write test today which is the same as the image above, with the slider at the left pulled completely in the other direction.
OCZ rate the 4k random write performance at around 16,000 IOPS, and we managed to score just slightly in excess of this figure. 4k sequential performance was very strong, scoring 51,548 IOPS.
It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
Windows boot time is good, achieving a final time of 23 seconds, identically matched to the Samsung 830 Series 512GB solid state drive.
The drive loads our test level in 20 seconds, only a second slower than the Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Solid State drive, a very good result.
The re-adoption of the Indilinx Everest controller has been seen as a positive move for OCZ Technologies. Sandforce have had their fair share of reliability issues in recent months, and the demand for high performance alternatives is as strong as ever. There is no doubt that the new Octane drives are reliable, and offer great all round performance, both with incompressible and compressible data.
The competition in this sector is really heating up, Samsung have the new 830 series powered by the capable S4LJ204X01-Y040 controller. Performance between the OCZ Octane 512GB and the Samsung 830 Series 512GB is very close indeed. We also have the new Corsair Performance Pro Series of drives which are powered by the Marvell 88S-9174 BKK2 controller. This drive is the fastest of the three units, both with compressible and incompressible data.
Much of the purchasing decision will be based on the price. The Octane 512GB drive costs around £700 inc vat. The Octane 256GB is competitively priced at £290 inc vat, although performance will be slightly lower than the drive we tested today. The Samsung 830 256GB drive is £329 inc vat, so it is clearly more expensive. The Corsair 256GB Performance Pro finds a middle price point @ £318 inc vat offering a good combination of price to performance.
All in all, the OCZ Octane 512GB drive is a very nippy, high performance drive which will suit users who demand balanced throughput when dealing with both incompressible and compressible data. The competition is at an all time high in December 2011, but the Octane drive earns our ‘Worth Buying' award.
Pros:
- great all round performance.
- high incompressible data throughput.
- very competitive price point.
- high reliability and long life.
Cons:
- Stiff competition from other ‘non Sandforce' drives such as the Samsung 830 and Corsair Performance Pro Series.
Kitguru says: We hope to see more drives using this controller over the coming months. It is a fine alternative to Sandforce 2281 powered solutions.
Good drives, I was burned on sandforce earlier this year so wont touch them again. I think the marvell controller is the best outside sandforce for speed overall
Yeah, most of the companies are wanting sandforce alternatives. I think hey have rushed some of the series of SF drives to market without thoroughly testing them. Corsair and OCZ both got hurt by them, so makes sense to move to other controllers. shame none of them are as fast. we need 600 MB/S / 600MB/s drives with both in and compressible files.
I love indilinx. like samsung parts they scream quality. id buy this over any other drive on the market now. im not just chasing performance figures as there is more to a good SSD than just the highest sequential figures.
Intel parts in this, very nice. good build, just so many options. id go for 128gb but the write performance looks terrible with that size in this series.