Indilinx Everest 2 Platform - Specifications

The Everest 2 SSD controller architecture features sequential bandwidth of up to 535MB/s, maximum random I/O performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, 4K random read performance of up to 95,000 IOPS and random write performance of up to 85,000 IOPS. In comparison to OCZ's previous Everest SSD controller generation, the transactional performance is doubled under typical use case scenarios such as managing and creating commonplace data such as MP3s, JPEGs, videos and digital camera RAW files.

In addition to this industry-leading transactional performance, the Everest 2 SSD controller reduces latency to 0.043ms for read operations and 0.026ms for write operations, yielding an improvement of approximately 80 percent over the previous Everest SSD controller generation. This latency reduction accelerates access to data, and hence, application system performance.

The above was taken from Indilinx's press release that is going out about the same time you read this editorial.

The performance numbers above were taken from our Vertex 4 review and should be the marketing performance for Vertex 4 when it's released. As you can see the read speed of these three initial capacity sizes holds steady at 535MB/s. The write speed scales with capacity though and goes from 200MB/s on the 128GB model all the way up to 475MB/s on the 512GB capacity size.

The Everest 2 platform does not take into consideration what type of data is being read to and from the drive. Incompressible data is transferred just as quickly as compressible data. We found in our testing that incompressible data is even a little faster. The distinction between compressible and incompressible data has only been an issue on drives based on SandForce architecture. SandForce used this to their advantage and write amplification was reduced by an order of magnitude. Indilinx's methods do not reduce write performance, but require more off controller cache to achieve a similar goal.

The OCZ Vertex 4 512GB model uses a massive 1GB cache buffer that retains host data until that data is forwarded to the flash. The size of the buffer is reduced with each capacity step. The 256GB Vertex 4 has a 512MB buffer and the 128GB model only a 256MB buffer cache. All of this cache is certainly expensive and without adequate power protection could be lost in the event of the host losing power.

Indilinx's Everest 2 platform is based on a dual-core, 400MHz ARM processor much like the Marvell controlled drives we've seen in the past from Crucial, Intel, Corsair, Plextor and LiteON. Most of these companies released different models based on the same controller, but used the ARM programming architecture to redefine performance attributes.

With Everest 2, at least as far as the Vertex 4 is concerned, heavy emphasis was placed on 4K write speed. Let's take a look at the performance information OCZ Technology sent over.