After the release of the cheaper Indilinx Barefoot based Agility SSD, OCZ have announced a new product, the Solid 2 Series 2.5" SSD.
The peak performance of the OCZ Solid 2 SSDs is lower than both the Agility and the original JMicron based OCZ Solid SSD:
- Read speeds(sequential) up to 125MB/s for both models
- Write speeds(sequential) up to 80MB/s for the 60GB and 100MB/s for the 120GB model
The old OCZ Solid provided up to 155MB/s in reads and 90MB/s in writes and the Agility provides up to 230MB/s in reads and 135MB/s in sequential writes. Peak numbers mean nothing, of course.
The reason behind this slower performance, especially in sequential reads, is the use of cheaper NAND Flash chips. This is not a big problem, as the drive still retains the 64MB of cache of the other models and provides very good random read and write speeds. The background garbage collection functionality is also expected to be part of this drive's firmware.
The big problem of cheaper NAND Flash chips is reliability, which will in part be due to the number of low erase cycles that the flash chips can endure. This information is not provided by any manufacturer, but one can assume OCZ should be using lower quality chips on these cheaper drives. Problems may arise from this, although if well handled will "only" mean you'll starting to loose drive space and not data. Either way, SSDs have evolved much since the first Eee problems.
Last time I checked, the Solid had 5000 cycles MLC flash and some reliability problems, although the chips did have some extra spare internal blocks and OCZ was sparing some extra capacity for redundancy. Mine still works fine but I haven't given it much use - yet.
The Solid 2 will be a lot faster than the Solid due to the high random read and write speeds provided by the 64MB cache and Indilinx controller. The lower sequential read and write speeds should not scare you as the drive will still feel hugely fast, not any different from the Vertex unless you'll go and measure it.
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