OCZ Core Series

Last week, we got our hands on a 64GB OCZ Core Series SSD and posted our initial findings, which were pretty encouraging. After an additional week and dozens of tests performed on the Core Series and three other drives for comparison’s sake, we still have warm feelings for the Core Series, because it opens single applications lighting fast, but we also have some qualms with its performance under heavy stress, particularly when zipping a file.

Other Drives Tested

Before we give the OCZ Core Series a star rating, we’ll want to compare it to more SSDs with MLC memory. We won’t get into it here, but for those who don’t know much about the NAND memory used in SSDs, there are two kinds: the more-expensive SLC (single-level cell) and the less-expensive MLC (multi-level cell) memory. To keep prices low, OCZ uses MLC memory in the Core Series.

For this round of tests, we were able to compare the OCZ Core Series to one other MLC-based SSD, a 60GB Super Talent MasterDrive MX, along with a much more-expensive SLC disk, a Samsung SATA II 64GB, and a garden-variety 250GB 5,400rpm hard drive, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue. While the MasterDrive sits in the same price price range ($250 - $300) as the Core Series, the Samsung gave us an opportunity to see how the new drive stacks up against units that are triple the price, and the Western Digital is just a typical hard drive that any notebook might have pre-installed.

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We all know that It’s only a matter of time before the last mechanical hard drive whirs its way into a landfill mound, right next to a Tandy cassette drive and a giant pile of Zip disks. But we’re all waiting impatiently, because SSDs still cost too much and store too little.

Update: We now have in-depth tests of the OCZ Core Series.

A couple of weeks ago, OCZ announced its Core Series, a family of low-cost, high-performance SSDs that is intended to make solid -state storage affordable for the masses. The Core Series is expected to retail for $169 (32GB), $259 (64GB), and $479 (128GB) while offering read transfer rates well over 100MBps and seek under 1ms. In a world where high-performance SSDs typically cost hundreds of dollars more — the 64GB Samsung SATA II we’ve been testing retails for well over $800 — OCZ’s advertised numbers are impressive.

Today, an attractive package arrived in our office, containing an OCZ Core Series 64GB. We immediately installed the highly-anticipated hard drive in our current testbed, a Gateway T6828 with 3GB of RAM and Vista Home Premium.

While we’re still running a variety of additional tests on the drive, we’ve seen enough to say that this drive has a lot of potential. But, without further exposition, let’s go to the tests.

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