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Introduction
Solid State Drives, or better known by their moniker ‘SSD’s’ have been around for a two years; with differing models available from a myriad of manufacturers. However what is interesting that we have seen no products from the traditional hard drive companies I.E Western Digital and Seagate. Over the past twenty four months we have had drives from Samsung, Corsair, G-Skill, OCZ and Patriot. So much so that SSD hardware has become viable products in their own right.
In the beginning the aforementioned drives had the onboard J-Micron controller, which brought its own set of problems such as drive stuttering and one had to offset the drive partition by 64 bytes in order to compensate for this. Later the more efficient Samsung controller card was used on the Corsair P64 model with critical acclaim; this promised much faster read/write speeds. However Solid State Drives still remained in the province of the enthusiast. Manufacturers decided to try and bring prices down to appeal to laptop owners with lower priced ‘budget’ drives with the Patriot PS100 but with very mixed results.
Last years champion of the SSD drives were any manufacturer that used the Indlinix ‘Barefoot’ controller card; such as the OCZ Solid Two drive, which managed to achieve the coveted ‘Overclockers Tech Gold award! However there is a ‘new kid on the block’ sporting the much hyped Sandforce based hardware. One such manufacturer that has taken advantage of this new technology is OCZ with their new product the ‘Agility Two’ drive.
Company back ground
Founded in 2002, San Jose, California-based OCZ Technology Group, Inc. has built on its expertise in high-speed memory to become a dominant player in the manufacturing and distribution of solid state drives (SSD’s), a disruptive, game-changing technology that is replacing traditional rotating magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs). SSDs are faster, more reliable, run cooler, and use significantly less power than the HDD’s’ used in the majority of computers today. In addition to SSD technology, OCZ also offers high performance components for computing devices and systems, including enterprise class power management products as well leading edge computer gaming solutions.
