Review: OCZ IBIS 160Gb SSD - HSDL

Posted by Winston

Sunday, 24 October 2010 22:03

Article Index
Review: OCZ IBIS 160Gb SSD - HSDL
Specifications and Features
Photo Gallery and Closer Look
ATTO and Everest Disk Benchmark
Sandra and Crystalmark Disk Test
Verdict and Conclusion

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Introduction

Right now, there's no stopping OCZ Technology. They've grown tremendously over the past 6 months in terms of sales, awareness and launching innovative new products, that just blows away all their competitors out of the water. Their SSDs (solid state drives) have won numerous awards worldwide, offering great performance at attractive prices. Furthemore, their high-end products such as the Z-Drive and the more recent RevoDrive have created quite a stir, offering performance that can be described as phenomenal. It seems that OCZ Technology are seriously gunning for the title, for being the best in its class for memory and SSD products. No doubt, many of us already regard them as one of the market leaders in this field.

It doesn't stop there neither. They've one step further and introduced their new proprietary HSDL interface, which can be found on their lastest SSD product ... the OCZ IBIS. This HSDL (High Speed Data Link) interface basically eliminates the existing I/O bottlenecks (SATA/SAS) and take SSD technology to new levels of performance, with a max read speed up to 740MB/s and max write speed up to 690MB/s. The HSDL itself is technically very similar to PCI-Express, in being a point-to-point serial data link. Now, we all know that theoretical speeds are not to be taken too seriously, so it's important for us to do some "real-life" testing for read/write speeds.

In this review, we'll taking a look at the OCZ IBIS 160Gb SSD (with HDSL interface). What OCZ has done, is to slap two SSD PCBs together and configured them in RAID 0 mode, using a Silicon Image SATA RAID controller. Inside the drive, you'll find a total of 3 PCBs, one houses the HSDL-based interface and SATA RAID controller, and the other two PCBs holds the independent SandForce-driven SATA SSD sub-units. Each of these SSD sub-units has a total capacity of 80Gb. All 3 PCBs are then housed in a 3.5" inch anodised/brushed Aluminum casing.

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OCZ Technology is now one of the major players for producing high performance memory, excellent PSUs, good thermal products, and course the world's fastest SSDs. For those who are not familiar with OCZ Technology or their products, here's something taken from their website.

"Founded in 2002, San Jose, California-based OCZ Technology Group, Inc. has built on its expertise in high-speed memory to become a dominant player in the manufacturing and distribution of solid state drives (SSDs), a disruptive, game-changing technology that is replacing traditional rotating magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs). SSDs are faster, more reliable, run cooler, and use significantly less power than the HDDs used in the majority of computers today. In addition to SSD technology, OCZ also offers high performance components for computing devices and systems, including enterprise class power management products as well leading edge computer gaming solutions."

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To fully utilise this new HSDL technology, OCZ have included a PCI-Express x4 card featuring a single HDSL port, as well as a proprietary-design HSDL cable. The SSD drive itself retains the SATA power connector found on most conventional SATA devices, but connects to the host PCI-E addon card using this special HSDL cable.

We're already seen what their RevoDrive can do in terms of performance, so how will the IBIS SSD using their new HSDL interface compare? If all is good, we could be seeing the world's fastest ever SSD (Oct 2010), but what's also interesting, is that OCZ have introduced their new proprietary HSDL interface. Being proprietary has its pros and cons. The pros are obviously the greatly improved performance, but it also means that you'll need the PCI-E addon card as well. Without it ... the drive is pretty useless, that's unless motherboard makers the world over adopts OCZ's HSDL interface on their motherboards ... that is something which is highly unlikely.

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As far as performance is concerned, we're expecting to see something that will really shock us all. It should outperform everything we've tested so far in our labs. And as I've said ... if OCZ's claims are correct, we could be seeing the world's fastest ever SSD (Oct 2010).

We'll be testing the OCZ IBIS 160Gb SSD on our test rig which consist of an Intel Core i5 - 650 @ 3.2Ghz cooled by a Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler, a Gigabyte P55 USB3 motherboard, a Geforce GTX 460 OC, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer and a Silverpower 650w power supply. It's the same system we've used to test all our other SSDs.

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a look at the specifications in OCZ IBIS 160Gb SSD featuring the new HSDL interface ...