News OCZ releases Vertex, Agility, Solid2 firmware update

OCZ has released the Arowana 3.55 update for its Vertex, Agility and Solid2 SSDs.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/28/ocz-vertex-agility-solid2-firmware/1

 

What a ridiculous update. Some performance boost on some models but with a guaranteed loss of capacity? Just another reason to buy an M4.

 

Well, that's what over provisioning is: extra space in reserve on the disk to reduce write amplification.

In fact, if you did the same on an M4 it would speed it up too. What a ridiculous comment.

 

Not a ridiculous comment - a ridiculous update, and for the following reasons:

Destructive
Only applicable to a restricted number of a particular model
Reduces the capacity on an already reduced capacity drive due to overprovisioning.

Why don't they use 90% of the drive space for overprovisioning, and sell people a 256Gb SSD with 8Gb of free space? That'll be really fast!

The M4 doesn't need overprovisioning to be fast. At least when you buy a 128Gb M4 you basically get 128Gb (near enough anyway). Also the updates are not destructive, they apply to all M4s and there is no reduction on your capcity to boot!

 

What about the people who have an ocz drive at the moment? Surely they will want the higher speed?

Edit: just read the article fully and that is actually rather a lot of over provisioning for not a lot of gain :/

 

Bad update?
you lose about 5.3% of space and gain 28% sequential write speed!
Doesn't sound like a bad deal to me - especially since I got my SSD because it's FAST, not big.

 

I suppose it all depends upon your point of view - with this type of drive, expecially with this update, there is quite a large reduction in capacity over the M4 et al (total space loss approx 17% of the drive for 128Gb), meaning that the realistic Gb per £ ratio is much reduced, and I don't believe the increase in speed averaged out across all situations is worth sacrificing all that capacity.

 

well you've payed for your drive already, if you don't think the upgrade is a good idea then you don't have to use it. if you think it would be a good idea then great news, there it is!
seems like a not-lose, win situation to me. whats so bad about that?

 

Cool, this might apply to me.

 

PS: you can get the same random write performance boost by formatting your drive with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDerase

It resets all flash cells so they don't have to be erased before a write operation (making random write slow at times - slowing your SSD significantly over time, even with TRIM enabled).