OCZ Core Series SATA II SSD 64GB

Affordable solid-state drive best for notebook owners



IF YOU'VE BEEN CONSIDERING a solid-state drive (SSD) in your desktop or notebook but are put off by the high price, the OCZ Core Series may be affordable enough to change you rmind. Though $279 is a lot to pay for 64GB, this drive is significantly faster than a traditional 5,400rpm notebook hard drive.
The Core Series uses a standard 2.5-inch notebook form factor and has a Serial ATa (SATA) connector. It will slot right into most late-model notebooks, you'll have to buy an inexpensive 2.5-to-3.5-inch mounting kit. The drive comes preformatted, and it offers roughly 60GB of available space. The manufacturer claims a mean time between failure (MTBF) of about 186 yers-longer than any traditional hard drive. It features a SATA II interface, which allows burst rates up to 300MB per second, but this figure is largely irrelevant, since the entire drive is similar to a regular hard drive's buffer.
Setup is as simple as connecting the drive to a SATA port on your motherboard. In our tessts, we ran it without any active cooling, and the drive never got even slightly warm.


The Core Series' performance during our test was excellent compared with 10,000rpm and 7,200rpm desktop drives-and simply phenomenal compared with traditional 2.5-inch notebook drives. In our 10GB file-transfer test, the Core Series scored on par with a 7,200rpm hard drive, taking 5 minutes and 13 seconds to write the file, then 4 minute and 44 seconds to read it.
In our opinion, the biggest benefits of SSDs isn't their speed but their durability. That's a key concern for most notebooks owners, and they would benefit greatly from upgrading to a Core Series drive. -Josh Norem
source: Computer Shopper October 2008.

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