OCZ SSD 32GB Solid State Hard Disk

 

Hard Disk, Hard Disk, Hard Disk. Over the past 10 years since I bought my first PC you’ve served me well. Sure there was one time when I knocked my tower unit off the desk and you decided to wipe off all my college work along with a years worth of files downloaded on my 56k modem, but hey it was my fault – I should have backed up.

I could probably also accuse you of being a bit slow and noisy at times, but in all fairness you’ve always grown to accommodate my ever expanding music, games and *ahem* movies collection. Sure, maybe I didn’t treat you to a defragmentation as often as I should, but those frequent clicks, ticks and crunching noises of your heads moving back and forth gave me reassurance and added to the whole PC experience.

However my friend, your days might well be numbered. See, there’s a new kid on the block called SSD. He’s fast, doesn’t mind being knocked about a bit and runs cooler than a cucumber. Sure he’s still quite small and I nearly had to sell a kidney to buy him, but PC’s are all about silicon and GHZ these days and those old mechanical motors of yours are getting quite dated. But before I tell you to pack your bags and demote you to my “storage drive”, I’m going to give you one last chance to redeem yourself….

 

 

SSD for a long time has been many enthusiasts wet dream. The thought of being able to replace that mechanical hard disk with a circuit board full of NAND chips that have almost zero latency and a sustainable read/write speed across the entire disk seems to be the missing part of the high-performance computing puzzle. Today we’re going to be taking a look at a 32GB SSD drive from well known performance memory manufacturer OCZ. With an SATA-II interface and up to 100MB/s read rate, the drive certainly promises to be blazingly fast.

 

Of course what good would any review be without some stiff competition! While the OCZ SSD will most definitely leave most normal hard disks begging for mercy, Western Digital have been manufacturing a range of prehistoric beasts under the name of Raptor for quite some time. Their most recently released Velociraptor hard disk features a 10,000RPM rotational speed, 16MB cache and 300GB storage space all served up on a 2.5″ platter – making it an absolutely perfect candidate for a head-to-head battle.

 

But before we get down to business, let’s get up-close and personal with OCZ’s shiny bit of kit…