OCZ Intrepid 3000 Series Enterprise SSDs Announced

OCZ Technology has introduced its next-generation Intrepid 3000 Series of enterprise-class SATA III-based SSDs with what the company calls the industry’s best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses. The new series takes advantage of the Everest 2 Platform, which is a combination of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller and OCZ’s proprietary firmware, featuring advanced flash management and endurance capabilities that extend NAND flash life and enhance drive reliability.

OCZ Technology has introduced its next-generation Intrepid 3000 Series of enterprise-class SATA III-based SSDs with what the company calls the industry’s best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses. The new series takes advantage of the Everest 2 Platform, which is a combination of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller and OCZ’s proprietary firmware, featuring advanced flash management and endurance capabilities that extend NAND flash life and enhance drive reliability.

The new Intrepid 3000 Series boasts 520MB/s for sequential reads (128K blocks), 470MB/s for sequential writes (128K blocks), 91,000 IOPS for random reads (4K blocks) and 40,000 IOPS for random writes (4K blocks). Compared to OCZ’s previous SATA III enterprise drives, the Intrepid 3000 Series delivers five times faster sustained performance in 4K write operations as well as two times faster sustained performance for 4K read operations.

The Intrepid 3000 Series’ proprietary firmware is optimized to attain consistent I/O responses and continues to perform at top speeds regardless of whether data is in a compressed or uncompressed format. To achieve this, OCZ’s new advanced flash management efficiently manages all of the housekeeping routines including garbage collection and enabling the SSD to keep up with incoming read and write requests.

The Intrepid 3000 Series features an advanced suite of endurance and reliability tools including:

• Strong multi-level BCH error correction coding (ECC) that effectively corrects errors up to 85 bits per 2Kb of data while significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER)
• End-to-end data path protection that performs data integrity checks at every juncture where data is transmitted, received, processed and stored ensuring that corrupted data is detected and not propagated
• In-flight data protection that prevents data loss in the event of a sudden power failure guaranteeing that the in-progress write operations complete and data is properly stored in SSD flash
• Internal SSD RAID redundancy provides additional safeguards to supplement traditional ECC algorithms, and further reduce uncorrectable bit error rates
• Lower write amplification by concatenating multiple write requests from the host while minimizing wasteful copy back operations of unaffected data sectors
• 256-bit AES encryption compliance for data security (encrypting data in large 256-bit key sizes)
• Additional flash management techniques such as dynamic and static wear-leveling, background garbage collection, TRIM support and system/storage monitoring via Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology (SMART).

The Intrepid 3000 Series also supports the industry standard 2.5-inch form factor and is available in two configurations: the Intrepid 3600 drives, which take advantage of reliable and cost-effective Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND media, and the Intrepid 3800 line, which features high endurance enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND media. For read-intensive applications, such as online archiving and web activity, the Intrepid 3600 MLC Series guarantees one complete drive write per day for 5 years. In the case of write-intensive or mixed workload scenarios like OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), email servers and analytics, OCZ’s Intrepid 3800 Series guarantees five complete writes per day for 5 years.

Availability

Both configurations are available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB and 800GB capacities and ship with a 5-year warranty. All Intrepid 3000 Series models will be available through OCZ’s global channel of authorized enterprise solution resellers in the first quarter of 2014.