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OCZ's new SSDs are popping up everywhere. They are set to release the Vertex and Apex before the end of January, with the Apex most likely coming first. Apex will feature an internal JMicron Raid and it will sport 230MB/s Read, 160MB/s Write speeds. This will be very similar to G.Skills new Titan Drive. The Vertex has an ETA of 1/31/2009. Vertex will have an all new controller and include 32/64MB of cache. The SSD will be spec'd a little slower (200MBs Read/160MB Write)than the Apex but the cache and the new controller give the Vertex great benefits. The cache will help with repeated calls to the same data, but the new controller will do something much more beneficial. The curse of the JMicron controller is SSD stuttering. Many of these issues are documented on OCZ's forum but they are a pain to fix and not a cure all. Hopefully the new SSD delivers stutter free operation and speeds that rival current MLC and SLC products from Intel.

Here is a new twist to getting the most performance out of your SSDs. Diskeeper has came up with a piece of software that is able to work at the operating system level to direct disk reads and writes in the most efficient manner. I am a little skeptical of adding any piece of software to increase performance but I am cautiously optimistic. I suppose we won't know til we get some benchmarks of the utility. Their tests ran with an 8GB Apacer SSD and they were able to get nearly 20x faster reads and 6x faster reads. A common problem reported with SSDs is a degradation in performance over the lifetime of the drive. This piece of software preemptively manages disk activity to maintain high performance levels. There was no mention of test setup other than the SSD. Read More>>>