Introduction

At CES we learned the Indilinx Everest II controller is a strong candidate for use in the upcoming Vertex 4 product family, OCZ's flagship solid state product line. With that in mind we now have a new interest in following Everest and it's progression as new firmware is introduced.

The OCZ Octane uses Indilinx's first SATA III controller, Everest. The Everest controller is paired with 512MB of high-speed cache as well as IMFT 25nm flash. Post CES OCZ Technology released a new performance firmware for the Octane family of products, version 1.13.

The new firmware update roughly doubles random write performance, a weak point in the initial release. With a 10,000 IOPS increase in random write speed we'll be examining the new performance of the 512GB capacity size.

When the industry moves to 20nm in Q3, 512GB will be the new 256GB. 512GB drives should cost much less than they do today and by the time Q4 rolls around they may even become affordable like the 256GB drives are today.

Specifications and Pricing

Before we dive right into the performance with the new firmware let's recap the OCZ Octane.

OCZ has released the drive in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB capacities and an insane 1TB capacity size. We were able to find all but the highest capacity drive at Newegg, Amazon and Tiger Direct. So, these drives are in the wild and ready to be plucked from e-tailers. The 512GB model we are looking at today uses a massive 512MB cache. OCZ claims a read performance of up to 480MB/s and a write performance of up to 330MB/s.

At Newegg this drive currently costs $869.99 after a mail-in rebate.