OCZ Colossus early testing data, now with ETA and pricing

You may remember us talking about the upcoming OCZ Colossus SSD – the first standard 3.5-in form factor solid state drive first shown at Computex 2009.  As it happens, some preliminary performance results happened to swing by our email this morning. 

SSD Type		Colossus(4x) .5TB	Colossus .5TB	Vertex 120GB
Firmware Version				v1.3
ATTO	Max. Read	261	262	261
	Max. Write	261	261	198
ATTO	2K Read	30.7	32.9	32.9
	4K Read	53.6	56.8	50.1
	8K Read	95.9	109.6	69.3
	16K Read	153.9	134.2	122.3
	2K Write	35.8	40.7	44.5
	4K Write	63.5	68.0	68.3
	8K Write	121.5	115.1	86.7
	16K Write	172.2	173.4	169.4
IOMeter (Queue=1)	4K Random Read	23.7	25.0	26.3
	4K Random Write	26.2	13.1	7.1
	128K Seq. Read	233.2	234.1	210.0
	128K Seq. Write	224.2	226.0	140.8

Placing a pair of Indilinx controllers (the same used on the Vertex drives) in an internal RAID is enough to saturate SATA on sequential writes and helps with random writes as well.  Adding *another* pair increases random writes even further.  These figures show OCZ is working hard to get their internal RAID solution working well with their Indilinx units.  Ryan saw the early models of the Colossus in-person at Computex 2009:


We’re looking at a simple 3.5″ form factor SATA drive.  The early word was there would be only 2 Indilinx controllers inside, but it seems OCZ has figured out how to shoehorn 4 of them in there.  More to follow once samples are available to us.

UPDATE:  We did get a couple of clarifications from OCZ on this as well as a few stock images to show as well in addition to my images from Computex above.  The Colossus does in fact use a custom PCB design – this is not simply Vertex drives jammed into a 3.5-in hard drive case.  For the higher-end Colossus(4x) product it will have FOUR Indilinx controllers each acting as a “virtual drive” working in tandem with the other controllers via an integrated RAID controller.  Also, the RAID controller that stripes these logical drives together is from Silicon Image – OCZ seems to have ditched JMicron for that purpose for now at least.

Even more important is this: OCZ is ramping up production and these drives MIGHT be available for purchase in as little as 3 weeks.  Pricing is going to be competitive, but not earth shattering:

• 128GB – $299 – $2.34/GB
  
• 256GB – $649 – $2.53/GB
  
• 512GB – $1199 – $2.34/GB
• 1TB – $2199 – $2.14/GB
  

While I don’t enjoy the idea of shelling out twenty-two hundred bucks for a hard drive, getting 1TB of SSD storage sure does sounds tasty…