While OCZ recently announced it would file bankruptcy and it assets will be acquired by Toshiba, it announced a new enterprise SSD series today. The Intrepid 3000 line up consists of SATA-3 SSDs with capacities of up to 800 GB. The drives are controlled by a Marvell 88SS9187 controller with proprietary firmware from OCZ. The company calls the combination of the Marvell chip and OCZ firmware the Everest 2 platform.
OCZ specifies speeds, measured in a steady state condition by which the drive is writing, erasing and re-writing data repeatedly over the full capacity of the drive, speed of up to 520 MB/s for sequential reads (128K blocks), 470 MB/s for sequential writes (128K blocks), 91,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads (4K blocks) and 40,000 IOPS for random writes (4K blocks).
In comparison to OCZ's previous SATA III enterprise drives, the Intrepid 3000 Series should deliver five times faster sustained performance for 4K write operations and two times faster sustained performance for 4K read operations.
Being enterprise drives, they are fitted with special features to enhance reliability, including strong multi-level BCH error correction coding (ECC) that corrects errors up to 85 bits per 2Kb of data while, according to OCZ, significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER). Data integrity checks are performed at every junction where data is transmitted, received, processed, and stored to ensure that corrupted data is detected and not propagated.
There will be two versions of the Intrepid 3000 Series available, both 2.5" SATA-3 drives. The Intrepid 3600 line uses MLC NAND and the more expensive Intrepid 3800 family consists of high-endurance enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND chips.
Both configurations are available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. The drives should become available in 2014 and OCZ hasn't disclosed any pricing information yet.
