Solid-state-drive (SSD) tech giant OCZ unveiled the Vertex 4 and Lightfoot SSDs at the 2012 CeBIT Show in Hanover, Germany, and their next two lines promise to shatter current data transfer speed limits.
OCZ says that their line of small Lightfoot SSDs will be available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities, and that they will have data transfer speeds of 750 MB/sec. That's right, 750 MB/sec!
As a comparison, one of the earliest hard drives to equip Thunderbolt, and make use of the Macs newest speedy port, are the LaCie drives that hit read speeds of up to 190MB/sec. And these models are SATA based and start at four hundred dollars US.
Unlike most SSD offerings on the market, OCZ has gone away from using the Sandforce controller chips. OCZ marketing director Joost van Leeuwen stated that the CeBIT debuted Vertex 4 series rely on an Indilinx Everest 2 technology that utilizes faster uncompressed links to go far beyond their contemporaries.
The Vertex 4 SSD models ship in late March or early April, and they will double the previous Vertex 3’s models’ 40,000 to 45,000 input-output operations per second (IOPS), reaching 90,000 IOPS in real-world use and writing information at 500 MB/sec and reading at 550 MB/sec.
But the Lightfoot promises so much more.
The company hasn't set pricing yet . . . [but] the product uses the Kilimanjaro controller jointly developed by OCZ and Marvell.
The Lightfoot solves the dilemma of laptop owners who cannot hook up an SSD directly into a PCI Express port.
By utilizing a Thunderbolt hookup, OCZ’s Lightfoot gains the fastest data transfer speeds known to man (or woman) by tapping directly into the PCI Express commands.
The Lightfoot has a preliminary shipping date of June for the revolutionary SSD that is leapfrogging over former data transfer speed limits and leaving them far behind.
