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OCZ Colossus refreshed as 'enthusiast' 1TB SSD, not worthy of enthusiasm
The formula for last year's OCZ Colossus 1TB solid state drive was simple: Two. Two of the company's 2.5-inch solid state drives in one 3.5-inch desktop package, with two Indilinx controllers reading and writing from two-bit MLC memory at up to 260MB / sec, over a thoroughly saturated SATA II connection. To improve the drive, the company would likely have had to upgrade to SATA 6G, support TRIM and possibly choose new controllers to boot. That's not what happened. The new OCZ Colossus LT is the exact same drive as its predecessor down to the read / write speeds, but with slightly cheaper 34nm flash memory. If the drive were substantially cheaper as a result, that might be enough, but pricing around the web shows that Colossus' price tags remain intact. You'll pay almost exactly the same -- about $1600 for 500GB, or $4000 for 1TB -- for this hefty SSD.
OCZ's Colossus desktop SSD gets reviewed: oh yeah, it's fast
It's been a long time coming, hasn't it? OCZ Technology's Colossus is the outfit's first in the desktop SSD space, and with capacities scaling as high at 1TB, it's certainly tempting for performance junkies who just can't pry themselves away from their tower. The benchmark-minded kids over at PC Perspective were able to get a drive in with final firmware a few weeks back, and they've pushed out a full review just prior to these things hitting retail en masse. Needless to say, all the numbers in the world won't make this any cheaper, but for those willing to spend at least $3.24 per gigabyte on internal storage, there's hardly a better option out right now. Reviewers found that read and write speeds seriously pushed the SATA 3Gb/sec limit, and the latter were "faster than on any SATA device tested to date." Sadly, the lack of TRIM support and the inability for end-users to upgrade the firmware put somewhat of a damper on things, but if neither one of those tidbits bother you, pulling the trigger just might be the right thing to do.
OCZ's Colossus desktop SSD line ships next week
OCZ Technology has been trumpeting its Colossus SSD desktop solution since June, but due to some strange issues with the housing that have been troubling engineers for the past few months, the company has been forced to quietly push back the expected release date. At any rate, the company has informed us that the drives -- which will arrive in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB flavors and tout maximum read / writes rates of 260MB/s -- will begin shipping to retailers "next week." If you're lucky, you might catch one or two e-tailers selling their stock early, but first you'll need to figure out where exactly that $300, $650, $1,200 or $2,200 (in order of mention) is going to come from.
OCZ's Colossus SSD comes out of its shell
We got a brief glimpse of OCZ's massive new Colossus SSD drive at Computex last month, and gotten the official word on most of the basic specs straight from OCZ itself, but we've only just now gotten a look inside that slightly mysterious-looking black box and, well, there's a whole bunch of SSD chips inside. Available in capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB, all of the drives boast a tightly packed design that includes a pair of Indilinx controllers and some associated DRAM cache for each, along with a dual-drive, single PCB implementation that makes it all appear as a single drive to the system. Still no word on a release date just yet, unfortunately, but it looks like these'll start at $299 for the 128GB drive.
