New OCZ Pro SSD... Bests Intel with interesting new tech

SandForce states that a full install of Windows 7 + Office 2007 results in 25GB of writes to the host, yet only 11GB of writes are passed on to the drive. In other words, 25GBs of files are written and available on the SSD, but only 11GB of flash is actually occupied. Clearly it’s not bit-for-bit data storage.

What SF appears to be doing is some form of real-time compression on data sent to the drive. SandForce told me that it’s not strictly compression but a combination of several techniques that are chosen on the fly depending on the workload.

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The OCZ Vertex 2 Pro is the fastest single-controller MLC SSD I’ve ever tested, and it’s not even running final firmware. It’s quite telling that SandForce decided to make its first public showing with OCZ. Perhaps all of the initial hard work with Indilinx in the Vertex days paid off.

The controller and product both look very good. The only concern for the majority of users seems to be price. For the enterprise market I doubt it’ll be much of an issue. The Vertex 2 Pro should come in cheaper than Intel’s X25-E in a cost per GB sense, but for high end desktop and notebook users it may be a tough pill to swallow. Especially for a controller whose reliability will only be proven over time. I’m curious to see what the cheaper SF-1200 based SSDs will perform like. I’m hearing that they offer the same sequential read/write speed, but have lower random write performance.

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