We've known about these drives for quite a while already, but today OCZ officially announced their second generation Vertex and Agility SSDs. Both drives are based on MLC NAND memory chips and use the new SandForce controllers for achieving up to 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speeds, with sustained writes at an impressive 250MB/s. The differentiator between the two, however, is the all important random write performance.
The Vertex 2 is capable of 50,000 IOPS with 4KB random writes while the Agility 2 offers a much lower but still remarkable 10,000 IOPS. To put this into perspective, Intel's often praised second generation X-25M manages 6,600 IOPS in this same test. Seek times for both OCZ solid-state drive models stay under 0.1ms and power consumption is rated at just 2W in operation or 0.5W in standby.
The Agility 2 and Vertex 2 series will ship in 50GB, 100GB, 200GB and 400GB varieties in a few weeks with a SATA 3Gbps interface, TRIM support and a three-year warranty. Prices have not been disclosed at the time of writing.
