The OCZ Solid 2: More Flash Swappin

We established that the OCZ Agility is just a Vertex with cheaper (priced) flash. But what the heck is the Solid 2?

OCZ recently announced the Solid 2, a horrible name (the old Solid was based on a JMicron controller) but similar approach to the Agility.

The first Solid 2 drives are being built now and they use the same Indilinx controller as the Vertex and Agility. The difference? Once again, it’s the flash. These drives use Intel’s 34nm flash.

The initial Solid 2 specs were very low and I’ve received confirmation that they were simply conservative. Performance is changing on a daily basis now and OCZ simply made the announcement to get pre-orders started. Apparently there are issues getting the Indilinx controller working with Intel’s 34nm flash but OCZ is making progress.

OCZ Gets Clever: Agility vs. Vertex, Even Cheaper Indilinx SSDs The OCZ Vertex Turbo: Overclocked Indilinx
Comments Locked

295 Comments

View All Comments

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    The tables the drive needs to operate are also stored in a small amount of flash on the drive. The start of the circular logic happens in firmware which points to the initial flash locations, which then tells the controller how to map LBAs to flash pages.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Bakkone - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    Any gossip about the new SATA?
  • Zaitsev - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    Thanks for the great article, Anand! It's been quite entertaining thus far.
  • cosmotic - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    The page about sizes (GB, GiB, spare areas, etc) is very confusing. It sounds very much like you are confusing the 'missing' space when converting from GB to GiB with the space the drive is using for its spare area.

    Is it the case that the drive has 80GiB internally, uses 5.5GiB for spare, and reports it's size as 80GB to the OS leaving the OS to say 74.5GiB as usable?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    I tried to keep it simply by not introducing the Gibibyte but I see that I failed there :)

    You are correct, the drive has 80GiB internally, uses 5.5GiB for spare and reports that it has 156,301,488 sectors (or 74.5GiB) of user addressable space.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link

    Weird. So what you are saying is, the drive has 80Gib capacity, but then reports it has 80GB to the OS, advertised as having an 80GB capacity, which the OS then says the capacity is 74.5GiB?
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link

    As a quick followup, this whole SI vs binary thing needs to be clarified using the proper terms, as people like Microsoft and others have been saying GB when it really is GiB (or was the GiB term invented later?)

    For those who want a quick way to convert:

    http://converter.50webs.com">http://converter.50webs.com
  • ilkhan - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    so they are artifically bringing the capacity down, because the drive has the full advertised capacity and is getting the "normal" real capacity. :argh:
  • Vozer - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    I tried looking for the answer, but haven't found it anywhere so here it is: There are 10 flash memory blocks on both Intel 160GB and 80GB X25-M G2, right? (and 20 blocks with the G1).

    So, is the 80GB version actually a 160GB with some bad blocks or do they actually produce two different kind of flash memory block to use on their drives?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link

    While I haven't cracked open the 80GB G2 I have here, I don't believe the drives are binned for capacity. The 80GB model should have 10 x 8GB NAND flash devices on it, while the 160GB model should have 10 x 16GB NAND flash devices.

    Take care,
    Ananad

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now