One Terabyte SSD hits the shops

How much superfast storage do you really need?

OCZ Technology has released a 3.5-inch SSD that packs a terabyte of data.

Called Colossus, it is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance for people who need really fast storage drives and shift a hell of a lot of data. It is supposed to be about twice as fast as the Intel SSD drives with a read rate of up to 260 MBps, write of up to 260MBps and sustained write of up to 230MBps.

Eugene Chang, VP of product management at OCZ Technology Group, said the drive manages to go like a banshee because it has an internal RAID 0 architecture.

This also makes it quite good at handling the little tasks such as emailing, web browsing, and file transfer.

However we suspect that it will be in corporate servers where most Colossus SSDs will find their homes. There they can cut back bottlenecks suffered by mechanical hard drive infrastructures and reduce power consumption as well as both heat and noise.

The OCZ Colossus SSD drives are available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB units and come with three year warrantees and dedicated technical support.

One site shows a price of $US3,572 for the top end 1TB drive, which sounds about right.

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17 Comments

Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.

qwakqwak Nov 19, 2009 11:28 AM	is this one a SATA2 or SATA3 SSD?
wlayton27 Nov 19, 2009 11:35 AM	No linkage? Are there any SSDs that plug straight into a PCI-E slot like a RAID card? 'Cause that would be awesome.
Hawkeye Nov 19, 2009 11:47 AM	SATA2, if the pic on Tom's is anything to go by.
lunchbox1988 Nov 19, 2009 11:50 AM	http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/pci-e_solid_state_drives
Periander Nov 19, 2009 12:28 PM	Yeah, they market the PCI-E ones as 'Z-Drive'. waits for end-user to complain that there's a C and D, but no Z drive in their computer
Neo-SiN Nov 19, 2009 12:38 PM	Fusion IO do an 80GB PCI-E drive for about US$800. 700MB/s read, 300MB/s write speeds. Just google ioxtreme. There is also an enterprise level drive called simply the iodrive, it uses PLC instead of MLC chips, so it's more expensive but has a write speed of about 700MB/s iirc. As far as I'm aware neither of these drives are available in Australia at this stage.
SceptreCore Nov 19, 2009 12:46 PM	Does anyone know what the going rate for kidney's is? I think I can afford to sell one.
sirtrancealot Nov 19, 2009 1:58 PM	anyone got a spare $3500 i can borrow?
thesorehead Nov 19, 2009 5:03 PM	Neo-SiN - woah. With RAM as cheap as it is, that would be a ridiculous system/apps drive. And finally a use for that extra PCI-E slot for those of us who don't care about SLI. 1TB, 3.5" form factor, bloody fast. Lovin it!
Mademan Nov 19, 2009 5:16 PM	I can just imagine the pain of coughing up $3500 for a state-of-the-art SSD drive, only to have Intel leap frog it for less money >.<
osama_bin_athlon Nov 20, 2009 5:24 AM	$3.5K? imagine the normal HDD space you'd have.....300TB or more they've gotta be kidding! just like DVD's when they first came out.....I'll wait till they drop to a couple of hundred bucks, thanks.
Periander Nov 20, 2009 6:50 AM	Yeah, but that rate at which the price comes down is relative to the popularity. Ergo, buy one to help push the price down for everyone! :P
Metasynaptic Nov 20, 2009 9:05 AM	Someone has to make the cutting edge, expensive early adopter stuff or we'd still be playing Doom on 486s. Despite the expense, technology has to progress.
thesorehead Nov 20, 2009 9:34 AM	And it's corporations that can afford the expense to bring the price down into consumerland. As stated, if you have a datacentre that has massive cooling and power requirements, these drives could be a good investment to improve your service (speed) whilst lowering your costs.
Snotty-ASO- Nov 20, 2009 12:48 PM	I know things are changing rapidly with these but isnt there still a prob with write cycles. I read somewhere that the a MLC SSD was only rated at 10,000 cycles and the SLC 100,000. I wouldnt pay big bucks for a drive that was only good for a limited number of writes.
thesorehead Nov 20, 2009 1:12 PM	Nothing's good for infinite writes. The MTBF is a factor you have to take into consideration with all your hardware purchases - it's just that when you apply the usage patterns for most lusers the MTBF is pretty huge.
iamthemaxx Nov 20, 2009 1:29 PM	Snotty-ASO- sounds like you were reading Women's Weekly.

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