Todays & Tomorrows Technology

If you’ve been on the lookout for another solid-state drive option to satisfy your storage needs, you might just be in luck with the Vertex Turbo SSD announced by OCZ today, which is a 2.5-inch drive and meant to offer super high speeds.

The new SSD features an increased clock speed for the host controller. It also has a 64MB of cache as well as a 270MB/s read speed and a 210MB/s write speed. It can be used in notebooks but with a bay adapter, desktops are compatible as well.

Other features include a SATA II interface, skip-proofing and low power consumption. The new Vertex Turbo models will be available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB variations. We don’t know pricing or a release date just yet, but we’ll keep you up to date.

OCZ Technology seems to always be toiling away on new solid state drives, but it's rare to find any from the company that are priced for the average Joe / Jane. Rather than aiming specifically for the fat-walleted enthusiast crowd, the Agility series is hoping to make a decent sized splash in the mainstream market. These 2.5-inch SATA II SSDs promise 230MB/sec read and 135MB/sec write speeds, along with 64MB of cache and a two-year warranty. We pinged OCZ for details surrounding pricing and availability, so here's the dirt: the trio of models will be available in a fortnight or so for $129.99 (30GB), $219.99 (60GB) and $349.99 (120GB).

Storage may not be as glossy or as exciting as a new netbook, MID or Smartbook, and as such we didn’t see as much hard-drive coverage from Computex as we did mobile devices; still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some deuced impressive hardware lurking at the show. OCZ brought along their Colossus, a 3.5-inch SSD-based drive which boasts 1TB of capacity and sustained read/write speeds of 265MB/s.

It does that by using a RAID-0 setup inside, managed by a JMicron RAID controller and a pair of Indilinx controllers which each control the flash memory. Unlike 2.5-inch drives, the Colossus isn’t going to be much use for notebooks and small-form-factor PCs, but for performance computers it offers the speed of a solid-state drive with the capacity you’d typically rely on a traditional platter-based HDD for.

As ever, there’s a catch, and that’s unsurprisingly the price tag. We’re not entirely sure when the OCZ Colossus 1TB SSD will reach the market, but the company expect it to be priced between $2,500 and $3,000. A cheaper (relatively speaking) 500GB version will also be offered.