Articles about Vertex
OCZ's new Vertex 4 SSD: Faster... and slower
OCZ has a new SSD that's both faster and slower than the previous model. That's what can happen when you swap controllers on an SSD.
A year ago the hustling and bustling SSD supplier introduced its Vertex 3 with a bought-in SandForce SF-2281 controller inside. Since then LSI has bought SandForce and OCZ has bought its own …
OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD review
Time was, when OCZ was typically first out of the gate with a range of SSDs based on any new incarnation of SandForce controllers. Yet, the first generation of the company’s popular Vertex drives were powered by Indilinx’s Barefoot controller. Now, with the fourth generation of Vertex drives, OCZ has completed the circle and …
Cabinet Office signs MoU with Vertex
Customer management outsourcing company Vertex has become the latest to sign a memorandum of understanding on efficiencies with the Cabinet Office.
It said it has done so as part of the Cabinet Office led supplier contract renegotiation programme to find new savings in IT business with central government.
Most of the IT firms …
OCZ Vertex bashes users with Blue Screen of Death
OCZ forum users are up in arms about their high-performance Vertex 3 flash drives causing Windows PCs to go into a blue-screen-of-death (BSOD) state, and further angered by OCZ's unconcerned response.
Poster GymRatZ told us: "I spent about 3 days attempting to get it recognised by Windows (7) 64 for install. Eventually after …
OCZ boosts Vertex SSD series speeds
Another month, another new, faster solid-state drive from OCZ. This time its a "Turbo" version of its Vertex SSD series.
Like the Summit SSDs announced in May, the Vertex Turbo drives contain a memory cache - 64MB of DRam running at 180MHz - to hold random-write operations until they can be more efficiently. The previous Vertex …
OCZ successfully sells self to Toshiba
Death-row solid state disk vendor OCZ has sold its brains to Toshiba for $US35m.
OCZ's been limping along for ages and last week declared bankruptcy and said Toshiba was the most likely source of cash to give its long-suffering institutional investors something with which to light their cigars.
The Japanese concern has indeed …
OCZ goes titsup, flogs own corpse to Toshiba
Solid state disk maker OCZ Technology Group has gone titsup and filed for bankruptcy.
The company has been in a mess for years, having recently 'fessed up to all manner of balance sheet borkedness and corrected its last four years' worth of financial emissions. Other efforts to right the ship included a big restructure that now …
Serco gulps more gov contracts with VDS gobble
Services and systems colossus Serco has taken charge of more government contracts by buying out Vertex Public Sector's data division: Vertex Data Science (VDS).
Serco splashed £55.5m in cash on the division - bringing in 3,000 employees and scooping its meaty government contracts, including administering child maintenance grants …
OCZ Vertex solid-state drive
OCZ has been rattling out new SSD drives with gay abandon. The 120GB Apex scored 70 per cent in our recent review and now it’s time for the 120GB Vertex to take its place on the test bench.
OCZ Vertex SSD OCZ's Vertex: standard 2.5in form-factor
Cast your eye down the specifications of the Apex and the Vertex and you’ll …
Troubled OCZ brings forth consumer SSDs with Vector
SSD supplier OCZ, hard hit by an erring CEO and now under new management, has launched its first consumer SSD using in-house controller technology, the Vector.
OCZ's roller coaster ride story from start-up glory to sick ward candidate can be found here. New CEO Ralph Schmitt announced the product but it was mostly developed …
Serco ate our IT supplier: Now what? – London boroughs
IT services relationships at the London tri-borough group of Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea are likely to become more complex following the acquisition of Westminster's IT supplier Vertex by Serco.
Serco said the acquisition last week, for £55m, brings it additional skills and capabilities to …
OCZ balances books, files results following 4-year omnishambles
SSD supplier OCZ Technology Group has finally filed its fiscal 2013 year results after having to correct the four previous years' results, showing how inadequate financial controls nearly caused the company to collapse.
As it is, the consumer and enterprise SSD supplier has been facing a Nasdaq delisting and severe financing …
It's all gone to Schmitt: New OCZ boss rips 'n' replaces execs
Flash storage biz OCZ's new CEO has replaced almost a dozen executives - and he's banging on about quality as he strives to resuscitate the near-dead OCZ flash business.
OCZ over-extended itself drastically under founder and previous CEO Ryan Petersen, who was ousted last year, leaving the company with far too many under- …
Intel driver tweak adds vertex shaders to old IGPs
Intel has quietly rolled out support for hardware acceleration of Vertex Shader 3.0 calculations in a range of its integrated graphics chipsets, including the Q963, G965, 945G and the mobile GM965.
The release of the new Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) driver, version 14.31, came earlier this month and was prompted by …
Swiss boffins slap together homegrown zBox4 supercomputer
Students and a few wandering professors at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich had a perfect weekend when they scraped together the funds to buy the parts for their zBox4 homegrown supercomputer and assembled the two-rack beast.
This is the fourth generation of homegrown machines that the ITP …
OCZ dazzles CeBIT with flashy Kilimanjaro package
OCZ doesn't just give us teasing hints about future flash products, it tells us about them at trade shows. CeBIT was no exception, with OCZ unveiling its Kilimanjaro controller; SSD Lightfoot with its Thunderbolt interface; and Vertex 4 SSD with its Everest controller.
Vertex 4 is a coming 2.5-inch SSD with a 6Gbit/s SATA …
OCZ chief dashes as flash cash stash bashed
Solid-state drive maker OCZ Technology's chief executive Ryan Petersen has jumped ship, leaving top marketing boy Alex Mei to man the tiller for now.
Mei will hang onto his job as chief marketing officer until a permanent CEO is picked, the company said in a canned statement. OCZ stock has been steadily falling after four years …
Flash slash at OCZ: New CEO cuts nearly 200 jobs, 150 products
OCZ, the flash storage start-up that over-extended itself by pumping out new SSDs before securing a reliable flash NAND chip supplier, has had excess products - and 198 staffers - dumped by incoming CEO Ralph Schmitt.
Founder and CEO Ryan Petersen resigned back in September,
Schmitt was appointed in October to clean up OCZ's …
Dell crams baby small-biz data center into a tower chassis
It is refreshing to see that someone pays attention in the server racket. It is also annoying that it has taken a top-tier server maker so long to get a true system out the door that is suitable for small and midrange businesses. But Dell may have finally done it with its PowerEdge VRTX.
A typical branch or SMB data closet A …
OCZ fails to kill off Blue Screen Of Death issue
Despite firmware upgrades, some OCZ Agility and Vertex SSD users are still suffering Blue Screen of Death episodes.
We came across Vertex BSOD episodes in June and have been told by Gym Ratz, our poster, that he is still BSOD'd but that a replacement Crucial SSD is working perfectly.
To get my PC back in action and prove it …
OCZ refunds punter for dud drive shortly after El Reg steps in
OCZ promises to refund purchasers of failed solid-state drives, but at least in one case it seemed unable to do so - until Vulture Central poked its beak in.
Dorothy Perry had three OCZ Agility SSDs fail over a period of about two years. The bricked flash drives wouldn't even show up in her PC's BIOS or that of another PC she …
ATI 'drops pixel, vertex shader 3.0 support' from R420
ATI's upcoming R420 graphics chip will not support DirectX 9's version three pixel and vertex shaders.
So claims German web site 3D Center, saying that the absence is "beyond doubt".
The site argues that since the R420 is derived from the older, proven R300 architecture, it would never have been easy to 'bolt on' pixel and …
OCZ unsheathes Talos flash talons
OCZ's Talos flash drive is set to claw into the enterprise hard drive business.
The Talos C Series is OCZ's 3.5-inch enterprise flash drive, in contrast to the Vertex, which is a consumer drive.
Talos is a 3.5-inch, 2-bit multi-level cell solid state drive (SSD), coming in 230GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities. It can run at 50,000 …
Samsung SSD 830
When it came to putting together a list of SSDs together for your latest upgrade, one name that you could easily overlook until recently was Samsung. Compared to its rivals in the marketplace the company hardly trumpeted its solid state storage products.
Samsung SSD 830 solid state drive Samsung's SSD 830: 256GB is an …
Plextor joins titans of MLC flash at the 90,000 plus club
Plextor has joined OCZ and SMART in the 90,000+ club, the providers of elite MLC SSDs that exceed 90,000 random read IOPs per second.
Fast single-level cell (SLC) flash is used to drive SSDs at speeds beyond 100,000 IOPS doing random reads of 4K data blocks. Multi-level cell (MLC) flash, with 2 bits per cell, is slower, shorter- …
Plextor M5 Pro 256GB SSD review
Some companies make a real song and dance about the launch of a new product, others just seem to launch something without hardly making a ripple. Plextor sits firmly in the latter category, which is something of a surprise considering its latest Pro SSD range, the M5 series, features not one but two new technologies that are, …
Microsoft slips out Silverlight 5
In one of its quieter launches, Microsoft has made Silverlight 5 available for download, and rumors suggest this may be the last major upgrade for the code.
Among the full list of improvements are hardware decoding of H.264 unprotected content using the GPU, support for 64-bit browsers and a rewritten graphics stack using built- …
OCZ exhibits semi-vapourware speed freak SSDs
CES 2011 The performance numbers are freaking fast with OCZ's latest road-rocket SSD, the Vertex 3 Pro. But they are semi-vapourSSDware, demo CES devices with no prices and availability.
It pairs a SandForce SF2582 controller with eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) or ordinary MLC NAND and offers up to 75,000 random write IOPS, …
Defra gives IBM 21% MORE dosh this year
IBM has increased its dominance of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) budget, after a 21 per cent increase in its income from the department. The firm now receives nearly a quarter of Defra's £398.7m spending with external suppliers.
Defra paid the firm £99.1m in 2010-11, according to figures …
Intel 330 120GB SSD review
When Intel launched the SSD 520 series of drives it caused quite a kerfuffle. The company had abandoned using one of its own controllers or even a Marvell controller, as found in the 510 series. Instead, the ubiquitous LSI Sandforce SF-2281 controller was utilised but with Intel’s own hand firmly in charge of the firmware. …
Kingston Technology HyperX 240GB SSD
Following OCZ’s great success with its SandForce SF2281-based Vertex 3 solid-state drive, it seems everyone is jumping on the SandForce bandwagon now. I recently tested Patriot Memory’s Wildfire SSD from, and today I have the latest addition to Kingston Technology’s HyperX product line.
It too uses an SF2281 controller, which …
Crucial v4 256GB budget SSD review
The latest addition to Crucial’s range of SSD’s, the v4 series isn’t, as you might expect, the follow up to the company’s highly successful m4 series but a different animal entirely. It's so different in fact, it makes you wonder what was Crucial’s thinking behind it.
Crucial v4 256GB (CT256V4SSD2) SSD Practical electronics: …
Samsung SSD 840 series storage review
When Samsung launched its first true consumer SSD, the 470, it was met with a generally good reception. Yet the timing of its release pretty much coincided with the arrival of drives using the second generation of LSI’s SandForce controller and its 6Gb/s SATA 3 interface. Hence, the 470 having a 3Gb/s SATA 2 interface was no …
OCZ opens wide and swallows Indilinx
Speedy SSD maker OCZ is buying fabless Indilinx, which makes controller software and silicon for SSDs, especially embedded SSDs.
OCZ is based in San Jose and privately held Indilinx is headquartered in Bundang, South Korea, where it also has a research and development centre. There is an office in Milpitas, not far from San Jose …
Samsung brings out superskinny flash drives for ultrabooks
Samsung is shipping mini-Serial ATA interface solid state drives for ultrabooks, the attempt by Intel to spark a Windows equivalent of MacBook Air thin notebooks into being.
It has extended its PM830 range of 2Xnm class, 2-bit multi-level cell SSDs, with their 6Gbit/s SATA interface and 128, 256, and 512GB capacity points, by …
OCZ wheels out lower octane SSD for Sunday drives
OCZ has a new SSD product and brand, Petrol, which uses cheaper asynchronous NAND than last month's Octane with its synchronous NAND.
Both Petrol and Octane are 2.5in form-factor SSDs with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, and use OCZ's own Indilinx Everest controller. Octane flash is 25nm IMTF 2-bit synchronous NAND, whereas Petrol …
OCZ conquers Everest, flashes 3-bit NAND at world
OCZ is showing the first mainstream computer flash drive using 3-bit NAND at CES 2012.
Flash comes in single-level cell (SLC) form, the fastest, longest-lived and most expensive, and also a 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) variant which is slower, has a shorter working life but is less expensive than SLC. TLC is an extension of this …
Flashy fists fly as OCZ and DDRdrive row over SSD performance
Two solid state disk SSD suppliers are arguing about NAND flash performance drop-off.
OCZ supplies NAND flash solid state drives (SSDs) and regularly announces high-performance products. DDRdrive has recently exited stealth mode and makes the X1 hybrid DRAM/NAND SSD. It criticises OCZ and other flash suppliers for products …
DWP cuts spending with top IT supplier HP by 4%
The Department for Work and Pensions has cut spending in 2010-11 with HP and BT, but increased it with Atos Origin.
HP Enterprise Services remains the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) second largest supplier, despite a drop in the government's spending with the firm. It received £629.4m in 2010-11, according to figures …
HP pockets half of all Scottish development cash
Figures from Scotland's Regional Selective Assistance fund show that ink giant HP snaffled almost half the total cash given out in the last quarter.
Between July and September, Scottish Enterprise via RSA gave out £14.8m. HP Enterprise Services UK Ltd got £7m of this to create 721 jobs in Erskine.
In total, the £14.8m grants …
OCZ jumps harder on enterprise PCIe bandwagon
OCZ has announced its third Z-drive refresh in two years, with the Z-Drive R4 going more than four times faster than the first version product.
The company has three PCIe flash drives: the RevoDrive is for workstations and NAS servers; the VeloDrive is for small and medium business and system integrators; while the Z_Drive is a …
SMART unveils smarter, faster, fatter SSDs
Move over Violin, OCZ, Seagate, Intel, et al. SMART Modular Technologies is crowing that it's now number one in the notebook-format flash drive space, having just introduced its new Optimus solid state drive, which it calls "the world's fastest multi-level cell and highest capacity SAS SSD."
The 2.5-inch Optimus uses 2-bit multi …
OCZ ups peak SSD speeds with Summit line
OCZ has rolled out its third 2.5in SSD family this year: the Summit series.
The range comprises 60GB, 120GB and 250GB post-format capacities. They all have 128MB of cache memory.
They have peak read and write speeds of 220MB/s and 200MB/s, respectively - though the 60GB model has a write speed of 125MB/s.
The three models have …
DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home
A brief look at virtual machines for home use resulted in several requests for system specifications and configuration details. It seems some of you would like to take a go at replicating my setup.
The hardware is simple. The motherboard is an ASUS P8H67-I Deluxe, with an Intel Core i5 2500 CPU, two 8GB Corsair SODIMMS and an …
OCZ's low price Onyx SSD
OCZ has a sub-$100 SSD offered as a netbook, laptop and desktop hard drive replacement.
It only comes in a 32GB capacity for now, using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND, and has a SATA II interface, TRIM support so it works better with Windows, and poor-to-respectable performance. The read speed is up to 125MB/sec with writing …
OCZ scores huge OEM client
Consumer SSD supplier OCZ has won a tier-1 OEM for its Deneva line of enterprise multi-level cell flash.
OCZ, known for its Vertex and Onyx consumer solid state drives (SSDs), unveiled an enterprise drive range called Deneva earlier in the year. It uses multi-level cell (MLC) flash paired with Sandforce 1500 controllers, and …
Patriot Wildfire 120GB Sata 3 SSD
Patriot Memory’s latest Wildfire Sata 3 SSDs come with the promise of read and write speeds in excess of 500MB/s along with read and write IOPS in the 60K region. All of this blazing speed is available in 120GB (£240), 240GB (£420) and 480GB capacities – a 60GB version is in production, but not currently available in the UK. …
Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD
Patriot’s first stab at a solid-state drive went by the name of Warp and used the oft-derided JMicron 602 controller. By contrast, the new Torqx series of SSDs makes the switch to the Indilinx Barefoot controller that so impressed us when we reviewed the OCZ Vertex.
Patriot Torqx SSD Patriot's Torqx: based on Indilinx' nippy …
Seven... SSD sizzlers
While there’s no escaping the fact that solid-state drives are still expensive, they are steadily getting cheaper and the capacities are increasing. For the average PC user to be convinced that it is a must-have upgrade, the performance benefits would really need to be experienced.
Costs aside, no doubt concerns as to whether a …
Intel gets spanking new SSD
Intel has replaced its mainstream X25-M solid state drive with the 320, which is more than two times faster doing sequential writes.
The 320 uses third-generation 25nm process technology, unlike the 510, which Intel announced earlier this month and which relied on older, second generation 34nm technology. The smaller process …
