AMD is once again expanding the scope of the Radeon brand that it inherited from the ATI acquisition. After getting into the memory business in 2011, AMD is now trying to make a name in the solid state drive market. But will the new Radeon R7 SSD series make a significant dent enough to pull the company from its financial slump?
There has been a lot of action going on centered around SSD marker OCZ over the last few months. OCZ filed for bankruptcy back in November. Shortly after OCZ filed bankruptcy, Toshiba stepped in and made an offer to buy the firms remaining assets. That purchase went through and Toshiba has now rolled out its first OCZ SSD.
The Toshiba Corporation is in the process of buying up the better part of OCZ Technology, the maker of consumer and enterprise solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. OCZ last month filed for bankruptcy, having been unable to comply with its loan terms with Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Inc. The purchase price is $35 million and is being made through a bankruptcy auction process.
Today the OCZ Technology Group, Inc., made clear their state of affairs, and things are looking bleak. The creators of high-performance solid state drives for computers of all sorts noted that they'd be filing for bankruptcy and that Toshiba had entered an offer to purchase their assets. These two companies have already substantially completed negotiations and OCZ noted that they believed all material terms had been agreed to.
OCZ has outed its latest performance solid-state drive, the OCZ Vertex 4 SATA III SSD Series, packing a new Indilinx Everest 2 controller for the fastest data crunching in the industry. Available in sizes from 128GB to 512GB, the Vertex 4 promises sequential bandwidth of up to 535 MB/s, with 0.04ms read latency and 0.02ms write latency. Drive longevity is also said to be much improved, beyond even erase cycle specifications.
Desktop gaming computers are getting more over-the-top every year, and with triple and quadruple SLI and Crossfire X motherboards now on the market, those who need the absolute maximum in performance also need a ton of power with which to achieve it. Enter OCZ's latest power supply, the 1000W Fatal1ty PSU. It's not the first kilowatt power supply around, but it is the first to feature the branding of pro gamer Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel - an instant way to make PC gamers sit up and take notice.
OCZ has jumped on the Thunderbolt bandwagon with its latest external SSD, the OCZ Lightfoot, a compact drive offering up to 1TB of high-speed storage. Previewed ahead of CES this week, the Lightfoot is the successor to OCZ's Enyo USB 3.0 SSD, boosting transfer rates to up to 750 MB/s according to the company.
OCZ has announced that its Deneva 2 mSATA SSDs, the 30GB and 60GB models, are now certified by Intel as passing the "White Using" portion of the Smart Response Technology performance benchmark test for ultrabooks. These high performance drives feature faster boot-up and data transfer speeds on a small footprint that's well suited for the myriad of ultrabooks we can be sure to expect this year.
This week we're seeing the fabulously powerful and relatively inexpensive OCZ Octane 1TB 2.5-inch SSD hit the review block, and what we're seeing here is that the manufacturers have backed up their claims in more ways than one. Price per gigabyte on this device is lower than the competition while the strength its displaying in this first round of hands-on looks is showing it to be more than a contender in the benchmark department. Could this be your next solid state drive, dare we ask?
OCZ has unveiled a pair of new SSDs that offer every fast access times and up to 1TB of storage capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor. The new SSDs include the Octane SATA 6Gbps and the Octane-S2 SATA 3Gbps SSDs. OCZ says that it is the first firm to reach the massive 1TB storage capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor SSD.
The folks at OCZ have today revealed their latest bit of hardware in the Z-Drive R4, running at 2,800MB/sec, over 500,000 input output operations per second with one SuperScale controller. One as in single. Then there's a dual version at 5,600MB/sec and 1.2 MILLION IOPS. These monsters are not aimed at private users, instead going for enterprise users, thusly the prices are not yet listed. You'll find that these units are available with SLC / MLC NAND flash memory, customer-chosen configurations, and functionality based on the requests of those laying down the bucks.
SSD manufacturer OCZ has announced it is acquiring Indilinx, a solid-state drive controller and software specialist. The roughly $32m deal - paid in common stock - will see OCZ acquire various patents around SSD technologies, including a high-performance smartphone/tablet solid state memory alternative called Tinkerbell.