OCZ IBIS SSD review

Final words and conclusion

When the first test ended, which was ATTO, the first words coming out of my mouth was "pfffrt, that's just ridiculous", seeing is believing.

Now I'm, not even going to discuss pricing in-depth as we all know that new uber high-end technology is always very expensive. It could have been much worse though, 610 EUR for 240 GB at this performance level might be a spectacular amount of money per GB, but considering the sheer performance, the extra RAID controller, the new HSDL interface and the fact that this product literally stole my heart... well let's just say that I'm not frowning upon what you need to put down money wise. But sure, it's a lot of money, I can not dispute that.

However, let me just say this, we've reached the nearly silly performance levels, it's really time for prices to seriously drop, isn't it?

Okay some good things of the IBIS series are simply overall performance, it screams it's phat it's nearly silly. And thanks to the SandForce controllers your random write performance is scary fast as well. Now I can rant on and on about performance, but you have seen our tests, and well... let them just speak for themselves.

Any downsides then? Well yep... the SiL RAID controller does not support the TRIM function, so over time performance will degrade somewhat. However with the controllers being SandForce based (horrendously fast Random IO) that will be compensated, let alone we doubt you'll ever notice it.

Another deficit we noticed was CPU load, under massive stress with IOMeter. Here we noticed a CPU load of an excess to 13%, mind you that we used a Core i7 965 Extreme on an X58 platform. Given the fact that everything is managed and controlled by the IBIS itself it's again clear that the Silicon Image RAID controller is a semi-software based solution (we like to call that fakeRAID), initially I already was afraid that this would hog valuable CPU cycles. But 13% is a lot, in all fairness... it's measured in IOMeter's 4KB Random read/write stress test which is pure S&M on your hardware. HD Tach for example shows 1 maybe 2% CPU utilization. How much of an issue this is to you... I could not tell. Though, it's a lot, we do feel it's a non-issue as we doubt that you'll be running the IBIS on a Pentium 4 based PC.

And that's it. The only two deficits we could find. Never ever have we been so impressed about an SSD storage solution as the IBIS. This is pure unadulterated performance thrown right at ya. Something worthy mentioning as well, the controller functions as BOOT controller as well. So you'll have no issues utilizing the product as Boot drive for your operating system.

Right, we are suckers for innovation new stuff and sheer performance and OCZ always is pushing that limit. And we like to see that so very much. Very few people will actually buy this product due to pricing, but if you do, well you just have no idea what's coming at you in terms of performance. Absolutely brilliant stuff, and with that word of wisdom, I'm closing this article. We give the OCZ IBIS our top pick hardware award... it's well deserved.

More info and pricing on this product can be found here.

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