In the weeks to come OCZ should launch the Colossus, a new 3.5 inch form factor SSD based on two Indilinx Barefoot controllers. Presented at Computex, we now know a little more thanks to new photos of the beast.
As with the APEX, what we have here is an internal RAID, but if the photos of the SSD are anything to go by, no additional controller is needed – the RAID 0 of the two Jmicron JMF602s on the APEX was handled by a JMB390. A 4x version coupling two Colossus SSDs is also likely to be available, using 4 Indilinx Barefoots: here OCZ will use an extra controller from Silicon Image to couple each of the pairs.
In terms of performance, according to the early information filtering through, random writes of small blocks of data (4 KB for example) will benefit most from this design. Sequential speeds are limited by the SATA 3 Gbits/s interface while random reads of small blocks of data don’t seem to benefit from the Barefoot RAID. These limited gains mean that this SSD is likely to be of only limited interest.
The OCZ Colossus should be available in August in 128, 256, 512 GB and 1 TB versions at $299, $649, $1199 and $2199 respectively.
