OCZ Octane 512GB Indilinx SSD Review

Indilinx Inside

Opening the drive consisted of the usual voiding of the warranty by peeling off the warning sticker and removal of four small screws.

Four additional screws later and the PCB was set free from the aluminum back plate.

On one side of the PCB resides a portion of the NAND, eight modules on the 512GB drive, and a cache chip sitting by itself in the corner. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. As we’ve seen on many of their drives, the PCB is clearly labeled with the OCZ logo is it comes from OCZ fab along with the controller.

A closer inspection of the MLC NAND reveals it to be of Intel manufacture and one of the few parts not fabricated by OCZ along with the cache. These happen to be 25nm synchronous chips which we know are the one of the faster varieties.

Flipping the board over, we see the remaining MLC flash modules with the controller and another cache chip. There are a total of 16 chips at 32GB each for 512GB total raw capacity. Note the tiny Texas Instruments branded mystery chips dotted across the board. We weren’t specifically told what function these serve but suspect they play a role in the 16-way interleaving listed in the feature set although how this employed, we aren’t sure. A mystery to solve for another day.

The Micron DDR3 SDRAM cache has a capacity of 512MB (256MB on each side) and is something you don’t find on the SandForce drives which makes them fundamentally different.

Finally we get to the good stuff, the Indilinx Everest controller. Bearing an official part number of IDX300M00-BC, it supports both SATA2 and SATA 3 interfaces and features advanced BCH ECC capable of greater than 70 bits correction per 1KB of data. It supports the usual items like NCQ, S.M.A.R.T. reporting, TRIM and background garbage collection. Proprietary nDurance technology takes care of the wear leveling to mitigate excessive concentrated wear on the flash to prolong its life.

For those (like me) who understand better through visualization, the block diagram above lays everything out nicely.