OCZ introduces the Vector SSD

We've been waiting a long while for the full fruits of the marriage of SSD manufacturers OCZ and memory controller creators Indilinx - but with the new OCZ Vector they're producing a drive that's all theirs.

Thanks to the OCZ own-brand firmware it runs quicker than any other SSD running the same basic silicon.

OCZ have gone a step further with the new Vector series of solid state drives and are proud to announce that the new Barefoot 3 controller is all their own handy-work. It's built in a dual-core configuration, with an ARM Cortex processor sitting alongside the new OCZ Aragon co-processor, with support for eight channels of Toggle NAND flash. In the Vector that's going to be using 25nm chips from a joint Intel/Micron venture.

My drive's on its way over the channel as I type, but while it should post similar sequential read/write numbers as the excellent Vertex 4 SSD, it ought to give us slightly quicker 4K random figures too.

That's important because the vast majority of a system drive's work is not done on large files - where sequential performance matters - what they spend most of their time doing is messing around with piddly little files. If it can deal with those quicker, then that should make it a faster drive in more general day-to-day use, like getting games loading quicker.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.