By David Ponce

We’re sure you’ve heard, but solid state drives are awesome. Low power consumption, smaller footprint and blazing fast speeds. Sadly they have tended to come in generally smaller capacities, which is why the Macbook Air comes with so little storage. But things are slowly changing. OCZ has announced the world’s first SSD drive to hit the 1TB mark. And it looks like it’ll have some very impressive specs:

Indilin Everest control will feature a 512MB DRAM cache, with the SATA 3.0 featuring read speeds of 560MB/s and write speeds of 400MB/s, and the SATA 2.0 with read and write speeds of 275MB/s and 265MB/s respectively.

Of course whenever you’re talking about a product that’s pushing the envelope, it’ll also be pushing the wallet. Although no official price has been released for this drive, you can expect it to be somewhere around $1.20 per GB.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ UberGizmo ]

When you think about upgrading your computer, the first things that usually come to mind are the processor, memory, and if you’re a gamer, the graphics card. In the days where you only had spinning hard drives to consider, you didn’t really gain much from upgrading to a new one, except more storage. Sure, a few extra MB of cache didn’t hurt, but it really didn’t make a huge difference. With solid-state drives becoming increasingly popular, we thought we’d take a look and see just how much you would benefit from upgrading to one.

OCZ was kind enough to send us one of their new Summit series drives to test out. Specifically, the 64GB version. Yes, 64GB doesn’t seem like very much storage, especially when we’re already hearing whispers of 2.5TB hard drives. Then again, I stream my music and videos from a network drive, so aside from a few games and applications, I don’t need tons of space. I might feel more comfortable with a 128GB or 256GB one, which is why they have those options available.  Hit the jump for my full review.

Features

The Summit series are OCZ’s performance-level SSD’s. They’re recommended for high-end gaming, business applications and even some enterprise setups. The drive we have boasts read speeds of up to 220 MB/s, write speeds up to 125MB/s and a sustained write speed of up to 120MB/s. (The larger versions feature 200MB/s write and sustained write speeds.) Other features include 128MB of onboard cache, and seek times of less than .1ms.

First Look

The drive itself looks much like any other SSD that you’ll see on the market today. It is packed into a 2.5-inch enclosure, which makes it perfect for a laptop. Unfortunately without the inclusion of any sort of mounting brackets, you may find it difficult to install in your desktop. Some newer cases feature 2.5-inch bays, but most still don’t. My computer doesn’t generally move around too much, but just having a drive sitting loosely isn’t something I’m fond of.

Test System

CPU: Intel i7 920
Motherboard: Asus P6T
RAM: 6GB OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Blade Series (CAS 6-6-6-24)
GPU: MSI Radeon 4890 OC Edition (1GB DDR5)
HDD: Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache
OS: Windows 7 RC1 (Build 7100)

CrystalDiskMark

The results of this first synthetic test really speak for themselves. The OCZ Summit SSD is clearly a superior drive. It’s nothing that we’re really surprised to see, but it’s nice to have these hard numbers to look at.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Here’s another great synthetic benchmark if you love crunching numbers. There’s really no point here that the older HDD is superior in any way. Enough with the boring numbers though. How does it affect my gaming?

Crysis/World in Conflict

If you were hoping to see something special here, sorry to disappoint. Since most games tend to load everything they need beforehand, you don’t tend to run into a lot of bottlenecks at the hard drive. Granted, you might notice some improvements during play here and there, but nothing that will blow your mind.

Crysis Island Level Load Time

Here’s where you’re going to see the biggest improvement on your gaming. Thanks to the Summit’s ability to read data faster than the old spinning disk hard drive, you can almost chop your load times in half, which can be a pretty big deal on some games that usually take forever.

Copying 5GB Of Mixed Data

This is probably where most of you are going to fall in love with SSD’s. If you work with a lot of large files, you’re going to soon find yourself waiting around a lot less. To be specific about this test, copied a folder with 5.1GB of video, music, documents and pictures to a new folder on the same drive.

Windows Boot Time

I have to say that I’m unimpressed with my Asus board’s slow boot times, but that’s another story. The OCZ Summit shaves a cool 19 seconds off from a cold boot.

Verdict

The OCZ Summit clearly outpaces the older hard drive, as I suspected. If you do a lot of work with large files, or just like your computer to run a bit more efficiently, then I’d definitely suggest keeping the Summit in mind. $225 is still a bit steep for only 64GB of storage, but the performance is definitely worth it.

By Chris Scott Barr

When it comes to solid state drives, there are two main complaints. One being that they are still limited in size, and the other being the high prices. Thankfully as time goes on, we’re seeing bigger drives and lower prices. OCZ is definitely doing its part to keep things moving, as they’ve officially announced the first 1TB SSD.

That’s right, we’ve finally broken the terabyte barrier with SSD drives. The increase in storage space calls for a larger physical drive, which won’t likely upset too many people. The new drive uses the 3.5-inch format, which is rather convenient. Most SSD’s these days are 2.5-inch, and thus don’t fit into desktop PC’s without an extra bit of work, or some type of converter.

So how much is this monster of an SSD going to set you back? Just a small fee of $2,500 is all it takes when the Colossus hit’s store later this month. If you’re too much of a cheapskate to throw down that much cash, then there will also be a 500GB Colossus drive for a lower (and currently undisclosed) price.

[ OCZ ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

When it comes to gaming hardware the first things to pop into mind are generally the CPU/RAM and video card. It wasn’t until I set aside the trusty wireless mouse that came with my old Logitech keyboard to review the OCZ Behemoth Laser Gaming Mouse that I realized just how much this device plays into the gaming experience.

Right out of the box my first impression was that it appears rather bulky, I say appears because once it was plugged in and in my hand it felt very comfortable. The extra width comes from the erganomic design which provides a comfortable rest for the ring and pinky fingers. This had a impact during a long gaming session with the new Ghostbuster’s game. One requirement in the game is to target and wear down ghosts which on harder difficulty settings can take a considerable amount of time. The lack of fatigue in my hand afterwards was noticeable.

Speaking of Ghostbuster’s and its precision requirements for paranormal investigations and eliminations, it provided the OCZ Behemoth another opportunity to shine via it’s high precision double laser engine and an easy accessible hardware dpi selector. Capturing ghosts requires a very precise and steady aim, setting the OCZ Behemoth’s dpi selection to the low 800dpi setting during those times is a sure way to wrangle even the squirmiest of ghosts. Switching back to a higher dpi for moving around the environment was easy and after a few times switching between the two became an afterthought. On my old mouse the sensitivity would have been frustrating at best and even after tweaking would never have matched the precision and ease of use that the OCZ Behemoth provides.

If I’m not busting ghosts I can also be found drudging around Wastelands in Fallout 3. In this type of game where exploration plays as much of a role as combat I like to lean heavy on the mouse to handle most of the controls while traversing new territory. Configuring the OCZ Behemoth’s programmable buttons is a simple process and with the onboard memory those settings can go with you to any PC.

The OCZ Behemoth Laser Gaming Mouse packs a lot of features into its ergonomic black shell, but the best feature by far has to be the price. For other mice with comparable features the range is generally $60 to $100, the OCZ Behemoth retails at $39.99 and can be found at online retailers such as newegg.com for $10 under that. At half the price of most other gaming mice the value the OCZ Behemoth Laser Gaming Mouse provides will be tough to beat.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ GamerFront ]

By Ian Chiu

We laptop owners can easily run out of storage space since most 2.5″ drives are still relatively small in capacity. Other than paying notebook vendors for over-priced hard drives to keep our warranty and then spending a beautiful weekend afternoon on drive cloning, there is a simpler and time-saving way to expand storage without breaking the bank. This is where OCZ Slate SSD comes in. The USB-based Slate is basically like any other flash drives except it is housed in an ExpressCard. The design allows the storage card to fit snugly inside the ExpressCard slot without the risk of it breaking off. On the opposite side of the ExpressCard connector is a mini USB 2.0 port which can be used for hooking up with desktop PCs or older laptops.

The Slate performance is decent with read speed topping at 30MB/s and write speed hovering between 15 and 17MB/s. The card doesn’t have a native PCI Express interface so USB 2.0 will always remain the bandwidth bottleneck for this product. Everything USB discovered the Slate to be particularly useful for storing music, video & photos as you can easily relocate them to the card and Slate’s speeds can easily handle even multiple 1080p HD playback. Overall, if you’ve an unused ExpressCard slot on your notebook, and don’t plan on getting a 3G wireless modem card, the Slate is something you should check out as an effortless storage option.

[OCZ Slate SSD ExpressCard Review @ Everything USB]

By Chris Scott Barr

When it comes to laptops, there are only two things that you can really do to upgrade your hardware. That would be adding RAM and swapping out your hard drive. With the latest round of MacBook Pros, there have been some issues finding compatible RAM that isn’t direct from Apple (which is always on the expensive side). Luckily OCZ has your back on both RAM and a new hard drive for your Mac.

This week OCZ announced two new lines of RAM, and a new SSD specifically aimed at Mac users. First their “Qualified for Mac” RAM comes in DDR2 and DDR3 flavors. The DDR2 is 667MHZ PC2-5400 with a CL of 5-5-5-15. These can be found in single 2GB sticks either alone, or packaged in a pair. As for the DDR3 sticks, these are 8500 MHZ PC3-1066 with a CL of 7-7-7-20. They can also be found in single 2GB sticks, or in pairs.

OCZ also announced their new Vertex Seris Mac Edition SATA II 2.5-inch SSD. The drives boast sequential read/write speeds of 240MB/s and 170MB/s respectively, and 64MB of onboard cache. Not only will these boost the speed of your activities, but increase your battery life as well. The new Vertex SDD’s will come in 30, 60, 120 and 250GB capacities. No word on pricing or availability of these newly announced products.

[ OCZ Product Page ]

This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

Back at the start of July OCZ unveiled its Core series of SSDs that addressed one of the largest complaints about SSD drives—the price. While the Core Series SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs of much higher capacity, the Core SSDs are downright cheap compared to other SSDs.

The first benchmarks for the Core Series 64GB SSD from OCZ have surfaced over at Laptop Magazine. Laptop put the SSD through some synthetic tests and the Core series did well in most tests against much more expensive SSDs and traditional HDDs.

Laptop says that SiSoft Sandra shows the Core SSD had a read rate of 112.4MBps and a seek time of 1ms. Boot time improvements with the SSD or any other SSD compared to a normal HDD were slight. The Core SSD was able to write a 5GB file in 3 minutes and 59 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 19 seconds for a more expensive Samsung SSD and 4 minutes and 40 seconds for a standard WD Scorpio Blue 250GB HDD.

Via Gadgetoholic