OCZ Launches the Intrepid 3000 Series Enterprise Solid State Drives

OCZ today introduced its next-generation Intrepid 3000 Series of enterprise-class SATA III-based SSDs delivering the industry's best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses. As the series supports storage capacities up to 800 GB, Intrepid 3 represents OCZ's highest performing and largest capacity enterprise SATA SSDs to date. Leveraging the Everest 2 Platform, a combination of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller with OCZ's proprietary firmware, the new series features advanced flash management and endurance capabilities that extend NAND flash life and enhance drive reliability, all supported by a 5-year warranty.

'Incredibly fast' best describes the new Intrepid 3000 Series. In a steady state condition by which the drive is writing, erasing and re-writing data repeatedly over the full capacity of the drive, the performance for both large block sequential operations, as well as small block random operations, is unrivaled. This includes 520 MB/s for sequential reads (128K blocks), 470 MB/s for sequential writes (128K blocks), 91,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads (4K blocks) and 40,000 IOPS for random writes (4K blocks). In comparison to OCZ's previous SATA III enterprise drives, the Intrepid 3000 Series delivers five times faster sustained performance for 4K write operations and two times faster sustained performance for 4K read operations.

The proprietary Intrepid 3000 Series firmware is optimized to achieve consistent I/O responses and continues to perform at top speed regardless of whether data is in a compressed or uncompressed format. In this scenario, OCZ's new advanced flash management efficiently manages all of the housekeeping routines such as garbage collection, enabling the SSD to keep up with incoming read and write requests.

"Our new Intrepid 3000 Series leverages in-house firmware with an impressive enterprise feature-set to enable customers with unprecedented performance, data management, endurance and reliability, and cost flexibility resulting in an optimal storage environment," said Daryl Lang, SVP of Product Management for OCZ Technology. "Delivering exceptional SSD responsiveness in even the most demanding and compute-intensive applications, the Intrepid 3000 Series achieves unsurpassed performance under any workload, regardless of data type and I/O pattern for the complete spectrum of applications including online archiving, media streaming and web browsing OLTP, VDI, email and analytics."

The Intrepid 3000 Series features an advanced suite of endurance and reliability tools designed to extend NAND flash memory life while providing the enterprise-class endurance, reliability and data integrity required by today's data center managers. This includes:

• Strong multi-level BCH error correction coding (ECC) that effectively corrects errors up to 85 bits per 2Kb of data while significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER);
• End-to-end data path protection that performs data integrity checks at every juncture where data is transmitted, received, processed and stored ensuring that corrupted data is detected and not propagated;
• In-flight data protection that prevents data loss in the event of a sudden power failure guaranteeing that the in-progress write operations complete and data is properly stored in SSD flash;
• Internal SSD RAID redundancy provides additional safeguards to supplement traditional ECC algorithms, and further reduce uncorrectable bit error rates;
• Lower write amplification by concatenating multiple write requests from the host while minimizing wasteful copy back operations of unaffected data sectors;
• 256-bit AES encryption compliance for data security (encrypting data in large 256-bit key sizes); and
• Additional flash management techniques such as dynamic and static wear-leveling, background garbage collection, TRIM support and system/storage monitoring via Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology (SMART).

The Intrepid 3000 Series supports the industry standard 2.5-inch form factor and is available in two configurations. The Intrepid 3600 drives utilize reliable and cost-effective Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND media while the Intrepid 3800 models feature high endurance enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND media. For read-intensive applications, such as online archiving, media streaming and web browsing, the Intrepid 3600 MLC Series is the best alternative and guarantees one complete drive write per day for 5 years. For write-intensive or mixed workload applications such as OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), email servers and analytics, OCZ's Intrepid 3800 Series provides the best option and guarantees five complete writes per day for 5 years.

Both the new Intrepid 3600 and the Intrepid 3800 models are ideally suited for mega data centers and makers of storage appliances where optimum performance backed by high endurance and reliability are critical. Both configurations are available in 100 GB, 200 GB, 400 GB and 800 GB usable storage capacity models. All Intrepid 3000 Series models will be available through OCZ's global channel of authorized enterprise solution resellers in the first quarter of 2014. More information on the Intrepid 3000 Series can be accessed at ocz.com/enterprise.