OCZ Vertex 2 Pro - SandForce Drive with Battery Backup?
Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 8:26 am
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:
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.
I asked OCZ about it and found this out. I figured it was worth sharing with our readers.
- vertex2_capxx.jpg (36.02 KiB) Viewed 4316 times
- vertex2_no_capxx.jpg (39.14 KiB) Viewed 4313 times
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.
