OCZ unveils 1TB SSD Colossus
Enormous capacity - even bigger price
Memory and storage specialist OCZ has unwrapped its latest SSD and it's a biggie: the Colossus packs in 1TB of solid-state storage.
The price is enormous, too: $3572 (£2123/€2392) for that terabyte capacity, though cheaper (sort of) 500GB, 250GB and 120GB versions are available for the less well-heeled.
OCZ's Colossus: 3.5in for a change
Unlike most other SSDs, from OCZ and others, the Colossus uses the 3.5in form-factor. They use an Indilinx controller for the Flash and a Silicon Image Raid controller to put the drive's internals into Raid 0 configuration.
OCZ claimed the Colossus' read, write and sustained write speeds are 260MB/s, 260MB/s and 220MB/s, respectively.
Those speeds are for all the drives but the 120GB model, which rates 260MB/s, 260MB/s and 140MB/s.
That model costs $609 - the 250GB and 500GB versions come to $1123 and $1770, respectively. ®
COMMENTS
For (almost) the same price you can get:
for the same 2,4 kEur you can get
8x 128GB Supertalent SX SSD and
1x 8port LSI megaraid 9260-8i
Wich is a tad bulkier but gives you an PCIe 8x attached SSD array with 1,5Gbytes of write cache (128MBytes on each drive and 512 on the controller).
Anyone willing to hazard a guess which one is faster?
...and if you don´t need the 1TB ssd you can either scale down to a four drive array or use a 70Eur 1,5TB Spinpoint F2 like everyone else.
Why?
The problem with the drive for ever bigger capacities is that you struggle to find lower capacities. At home I have several desktops and laptops around the house, all with massive, empty hard drives in the 160-320gb range. All the non-transient data is stored on a high capacity file server. Bring back the cheap 40gb drives (80gb for a dual-boot system).
Appropriate name
"Colossus" describes both its capacity and its price tag.
Well Done Chaps
Well done !. Now get the price down to sixty quid so us peasants can afford to buy it.
Read/Write
Looks to me like the (severely) limiting factor there is the SATA speed.
This is the big downside to doing RAID 0 "in the box" rather than taking the conventional approach. Backing this up, I see that OCZ also do a 1TB SSD with internal RAID 0 as a PCIeX8 card in their "Z-Drive" range and that apparently kicks out 870/780 on Reads/Writes with sustained write at 600.
Not too much more expensive either. Let's face it, if speed's important enough that you can justify chucking over two grand at a disk, you can probably run to a few hundred more for that sort of performance hike.
