OCZ Technology has unveiled the world's first 1TB 2.5in solid state drive: the OCZ Octane. Until now, most consumer-level 2.5in SSDs have topped out at around 250GB.
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The Octane series has a new controller optimised for mixed-workload performance (dubbed Indilinx Everest) that attempts to strike the "ideal balance" between capacity, physical size, and speed.
"OCZ has reached an important milestone in the development of its own controller technology," said OCZ Senior Storage Analyst James E. Bagley. "The high sustained performance, even with compressed files, the rapid boot feature and high access speeds using SATA 3.0 protocol puts their controller technology in the major league."
If OCZ is to be believed, the SATA 3.0 version of the Octane will boast read speeds of up to 560MB/s and write speeds of up to 400 MB/s; significant gains on the current crop of 2.5in SSDs. It also has an expanded lifespan of ten years (mind you, this estimation is based on "average use" which could mean anything, so treat that number with caution).

Here's a full list of specs for the 1TB Octane, from OCZ:
- Dual Core CPU
- Up to 512MB DRAM cache
- 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models
- High sequential speeds:
Octane (SATA 3.0) Read: 560MB/s; Write: 400MB/s
Octane-S2 (SATA 2.0) Read: 275MB/s; Write: 265MB/s
- High transactional performance - Optimized for 4K to 16K compressed files
Octane (SATA 3.0) 45,000 random read 4K IOPS
Octane-S2 (SATA 2.0) 30,000 random read 4K IOPS
- Industry-low latency:
Read: 0.06ms; Write: 0.09ms
- Up to 8 channels with up to 16-way Interleaving
- Advanced BCH ECC engine enabling more than 70 bits correction capability per 1KB of data
- Proprietary NDurance Technology: increases NAND life up to 2X of the rated P/E cycles
- NCQ support up to 32 queue depth
- End-to-end data protection
- TRIM support
- Industry standard SMART reporting
The OCZ Octane SSD Series will be available from 1st November. Pricing has yet to be announced, but you can expect to pay northwards of $1,000 for 1TB version.