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OCZ Technology Group this week announced two new families of solid-state drives (SSDs) in 1.8” form-factor designed for those, who plan to upgrade their ultra-slim notebooks or other devices featuring rather rare 1.8” hard disk drives (HDDs).
The San Jose, California-based company, which is mostly known these days for its advanced memory modules and solid-state drives, now offers Vertex 2 and Onyx SSDs in 1.8” form-factors targeting customers seeking for either high performance or low price amid generally increased reliability. There are two 1.8” options that OCZ’s customers may choose from:
- OCZ 1.8” Vertex 2 solid-state drives are based on a SandForce controller excel in 4KB random writes up to 50 000 IOPS and feature transfer rates up to 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write. It will be available in 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB capacities.
- OCZ 1.8” Onyx SSDs make use of Indilinx controllers and deliver read speeds of up to 145MB/s. The SSDs are available in 32GB and 64GB capacities and feature 64MB of DRAM cache.
Both drives are designed for Serial ATA-300 interface and support Trim feature available in Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 operating systems.
Even though the new drives seem to be quite interesting, their perspectives on the market are not exactly clear. Systems that actually feature 1.8” drives (whether those are SSDs or HDDs) are premium systems by definition that are rarely upgraded due to the fact that they are designed to offer sufficient performance based on their specification. Only time will tell whether there is upgrade market for 1.8” SSDs.
“SSDs provide numerous benefits to mobile users including improved performance and reliability as well as lower power consumption versus traditional hard drives. We are now introducing two new drives that are designed to cater to the entire range of mobile applications including the Vertex2 1.8” which delivers the same performance as our popular 2.5” version in a smaller form factor for customers looking to achieve maximum performance on the go, and the new Onyx 1.8” which is designed for consumers looking for a quality SSD that is aggressively priced,” said Alex Mei, chief marketing officer at OCZ Technology.
