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OCZ introduces the ARC 100 Series of SSDs

by Mark Tyson on 13 August 2014, 14:05

Tags: OCZ (NASDAQ:OCZ), Toshiba (TYO:6502)

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OCZ has announced a new range of SSD drives which target the value conscious customer. Despite the value tag the OCZ ARC 100 Series of SSDs are still said to offer "superior performance" and are its first SKUs to feature Toshiba's next generation A19nm NAND flash.

It is probably the value segment, and the PC users who are holding onto their mechanical spinning HDD drives waiting for a particular low £$/GB market condition to be met, that would benefit most from an SSD storage system upgrade. OCZ is cannily targeting these users with drives which will be released at MSRPs offering costs of $0.50/GB. With retailer competition these prices should slip even lower in short order. OCZ also keeps the costs down with these drives by eschewing any software or accessory fixing-hardware bundles.

As hinted at in the opening paragraph these OCZ ARC 100 Series drives aren't merely an exercise in cost cutting as they contain parent company Toshiba's newest A19nm NAND flash. This, paired with the OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller does seem to offer a very well balanced mixed workload performance. It performs particularly well doing sustained 4K random writes. Please refer to the graph below.

The OCZ ARC 100 Series of SSDs are 2.5-inch form factor SATA III 6Gb/s interfaced storage devices. They support 256-bit AES-compliant encryption, ECC error correction, SMART monitoring and are rated for 20GB/day of host writes for 3 years. Power consumption is 0.6W when idle, up to 3.45W when active. For performance specs on all of the drives in the range please check the table below. The MSRP prices of the drives are $75 for the OCZ ARC 120GB, $120 for the ARC 240GB and $240 for the ARC 480GB.

HEXUS labs will be scrutinising these new value-orientated OCZ ARC 100 drives shortly.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?
I wonder how they'll fare against the MX100 and 840 Evo drives. I hope these have been thoroughly tested - no doubt Toshiba want to turn around the image of their OCZ purchase!
Bagnaj97
I wonder how they'll fare against the MX100 and 840 Evo drives. I hope these have been thoroughly tested - no doubt Toshiba want to turn around the image of their OCZ purchase!

It shows it compared to the 840 evo in the graph, generally it does more iops than the samsung except under 100% load.
DemonHighwayman
hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?

I stuck an old m300 in my wife's dual core atom netbook. Made a decent improvement in responsiveness but didn't make it super fast. Also helped with boot speed. I'd say worth it if its cheap enough! The M300 was £30 so was worth it at that price!
DemonHighwayman
hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?
Depends what he's doing - obviously boot up time would be much improved with your SSD. And if - like mine - he's doing the usual email/web/office stuff then I would have thought that a dual-core Atom would be able to cope. Is more memory an option too - in which case do a double upgrade of storage and RAM?

As to the SSD itself, I did a quick calc on the 480GB and it works out at about £172 inc VAT and doing a USD->GBP conversion. Downside, from my point of view, is that the Samsung 840 EVO 500GB is also available at around that price and I'd think that this would be a better drive - being “mainstream” rather than a “budget” model. Plus prices on the 840EVO's might fall further when the 850's come out.