Introduction
Octane - when you look it up it states that it is any of 18 isomeric saturated hydrocarbons having the formula C8H18 , some of which are obtained in the distillation and cracking of petroleum. So yeah that must be a euphemism for performance and speed alright.
And well, after testing the OCZ Octane, we can only agree.
OCZ has been dominating the solid state market ever since the very beginning. Ever since a year or two their "hot" SSDs are all SandForce controllers based. At this moment that poses two concerns, most of you got scared away from SandForce after the initial series 2200 firmware issues (which have been 100% resolved I want to add), but secondly, a couple of weeks ago we learned that LSI has purchased SandForce. And though LSI is a colleague, they now also are competition.
LSI isn't dumb though so we expect lot of SandForce based solutions in the future.
However, and not totally by accident, OCZ made a remarkable move which I think was a year ago. They purchased the intellectual property of a company known as Indilinx. In the 2nd wave of the SSD generation they had a massively potential controller combined with a cache chip.
Once Indilinx was taken over and restructured into OCZ, they started designing something hot and new, and the first Indilinx based SATA3 (6G) product has arrived on the market, we end where we started... Octane.
The Octane release might be a bulls-eye hit, as stated, a lot of people do not trust SandForce anymore (which we disagree with) but it surely stalls a segment of sales for OCZ. Once the Indilinx based product arrived in our binary test facility located in a secret place in Groningen we honestly didn't expect too much of it. But oh man, the tie has turned around, as the octane series is hugely impressive, extremely fast and a bit more affordable as well.
So yeah, this octane will definitely "fuel" up your PC, but let's startup the actual review shall we?
