OCZ's new SSD - now in orange!
Good, fast storage for a gaming rig is pretty desirable, since you'll need to have room for your OS as well as the huge amount of games, programs and media files stored. The problem you run into eventually is speed - the more stuff you have installed onto a single drive, the more it has to work to access the information for everything at once, and it'll seem quite slow.
The solution to this is either to add another traditional Hard Disk Drive (that is essentially magnetically charged discs and reader heads that rotate very fast), or to add a Solid State Drive, also known as SSD. This is an attractive choice; being solid state means that there are no moving parts that can wear down or break - but that's not to say they're perfect either.
Each write operation of a cell in the drive (copying a file, for example) will cause that cell to wear down a little electrically, and eventually it won't be able to hold any information. Write-level algorithms are used in SSDs to spread these writes all over the cells of the drive, to limit specific areas wearing thin sooner.
This drive has 120GB of flash, giving 117GB of usable space. Plenty of space for everything you'd need, and the speed is no slouch either - with an average read of 177.7MB/s, maximum burst of 235.2MB/s and an access speed of only 0.2ms. It averaged roughly 100MB/s when we messed around copying files, and was very snappy throughout testing.
It did seem to get a little warm compared to other SSDs we've looked at, but this didn't pose a problem even after many hours of use. It's not limited too much by space, and the price is accessible enough for the serious enthusiast to consider it as a real option - and who can touch the coolness factor of having a SSD-powered rig?
Issue: 133 | February, 2012