OCZ releases updated 1.8-in SSD line for netbooks, tablets

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. today released a series of 1.8-in. solid state drives (SSD) to offer a storage upgrade for products such as netbooks , ultra-thin notebooks and tablets.

The new drives have the same performance as their larger 2.5-in. counterparts, which are sold under the Vertex and Onyx product names, and come with a three-year warranty and are rated for 2 million-hour meantime between failures.

Like larger SSDs, the flash devices offer users faster application loading, snappier data access, shorter boot-ups, and slightly longer battery life for their systems.

The new OCZ 1.8-in Vertex 2 uses a higher-end SandForce processor, which excels in 4KB random writes up to 50,000 input/outputs per second (IOPS) and boasts industry-leading data transfer rates of up to 285MB/sec for reads and 275MB/sec for writes. The drive is aimed at notebooks, netbooks, nettops, and tablet PCs.

OCZ existing 2.5-in Vertex 2 SSD a> is sold into data centers, which requires high throughput for relational databases and streaming media, so the 1.8-in Vertex 2 is appropriately aimed at higher-performance computing needs.

The new 1.8-in Vertex 2 is available in capacities of 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB.

The OCZ 1.8-in Onyx SSDs are the more economical of the new drives and are being targeted at mainstream consumers looking to increase the performance and lifespan of their existing platforms.

In 32GB and 64GB capacities, the Onyx uses the industry stalwart Indilinx controller to deliver data transfer speeds up to 145MB/sec. The drive uses 64MB of cache to achieve that throughput, and use only 1 watt of power consumption even during intensive computing.

"Solid State Drives provide numerous benefits to mobile users, including improved performance and reliability as well as lower power consumption versus traditional hard drives," Alex Mei, chief marketing office for OCZ, said in a statement.

The SSDs use SATA 3Gb/sec protocol and feature TRIM support for Windows 7 systems, which allows the operating system to tell an SSD which data blocks are no longer in use so that it will not waste time attempting to access them.

OCZ did not offer pricing information at time of the posting of this report.

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