OCZ Vertex 2 Pro - SandForce Drive with Battery Backup?

[Apoptosis]

I'm not sure how many of you have heard, but OCZ is coming out with a second generation Vertex drive called the Vertex 2. LR touched on this here during our CES coverage at the start of this month. We were told that these new drives would feature SandForce controllers and that they would have a 'battery' backup in them. This was fairly interesting as if a power failure happened the drive could finish writing data before it died thanks to a large 'super capacitor' called the Cap-XX. Some of the early previews showed this being inside the drive:

vertex2_capxx.jpg (36.02 KiB) Viewed 3809 times

Notice the big silver thing that says CAP-XX on it. That would be the 'battery backup' that is in question here. I just recently got my Vertex 2 Pro drive for testing and noticed that it doesn't contain this part at all.

vertex2_no_capxx.jpg (39.14 KiB) Viewed 3806 times

I asked OCZ about it and found this out. I figured it was worth sharing with our readers.

This will NOT be present on the consumer class devices Vertex2, and Vertex2 Pro. This will only be on our enterprise class Deneva product line. Basically what it's for is in event of a sudden power loss the drive will go into a mode where it will focus on completing write commands using the power in the super cap. Its only enough for a short burst, but it's enough to get the job done. This is important on SSDs more so than HDDs in enterprise. On an HDD when write caching is turned off, the last write command is lost, but the rest of your data is secure. On standard SSDs because of the nature of Flash and Flash management it is not typically possible to guarantee data integrity on sudden power loss. The enterprise class Deneva Series will be the first high performance readily available SSD that guarantees data integrity on sudden power loss. As a bonus effect the last write does in fact complete so no data is lost.

[gwolfman]

It probably only cost a few dollars anyways, too bad it's not included. Probably only to force enterprises to purchase the more expensive version.

[kenc51]

It probably only cost a few dollars anyways, too bad it's not included. Probably only to force enterprises to purchase the more expensive version.

Enterprise customers don't care about pricing, even if the consumer version had the battery they still wouldn't go near them.
In fact most enterprise customers won't go near SSD's at all.
The vast majority just run RAID5 on SCSI or SAS drives.
It's proven technology, even if it's slower and uses more power the lower chance of hardware failure is the main reason why sys admins won't go near them, not to mention the crap users have to go through with garbage collection, trim support etc.

[shamrok3]

Just get a UPS

[Sporg]

Just get a UPS

Then what if your server PSU goes down?

Interesting concept, we'll see how it goes.