OCZ have been a big part of the SSD scene for more than a few years. They have brands such as the Revo and Vertex under the OCZ label which, if you have been paying any attention to the SSD world, have been among the top performers consistently for the last couple of years.
Today OCZ have delivered a 512GB “Octane” SSD to us, one of the first drives to accommodate the new Indilinx Everest controller. Why the move away from SandForce? Quite simple really: OCZ own Indilinx, and this is the first controller produced by the company since the acquisition. What kind of message would it send if OCZ didn’t use the controller they own on their new range of “petrol” drives?
It should also be mentioned that the 512GB drive sent to us today will perform slightly faster than the smaller variants (usually 1-5%), so if you do plan on picking up a 128 or 256Gb variant, that should be considered before forking out your hard-earned.
As for performance comparisons, the OCZ Octane seems to perform very well in regards to seek times. This is usually a good indication of how “snappy” a drive will feel, and how quickly an app installed on the drive will be located, and initiated.
The drive does have fairly sloppy write times in 4K, but that usually isn’t a big issue as writing large files to an SSD is rather rare past the initial OS and program installs. Read times are fair, but far from astounding; this may be noticeable in some complex or large tasks where files greater than a few gigabytes need to be opened up; though in the real-world it likely only equates to a second or two at most.
For the price, this drive isn’t the fastest around, nor is it the best value in terms of GB/$. However, this drive in its 256GB variant should perform within a few percent, and should bring with it a more digestible price tag.
