something SSD you didn't know about from OCZ

[Tony]

VALUE matters to us at OCZ, you all know we have a new SSD coming called Vertex which we are positioning as a high performance part; what you didn't know is we have also been working on a new budget/value part.

I get questions about Core V3 all the time, the drive I will talk about here was destined to be Core V3 but we decided it needed a new name...hence enter Apex

Now I am going to be very clear about this new drive and where we think it will shine and where we are positioning it.

Apex is based off Core V2...now before you all shout crappy Jmicron again please listen up. We wanted to bring a cheap fast drive to market, one for the hardware raid fanboys but also one for those who don't mind a little OS tweaking so they can run 1 drive in a laptop etc or run SB raid with 2 or more drives. The point here though is this drive will be very affordable.
I have been watching forums for 2 months now and hardware/software raid is starting to gain momentum, people are liking what they see with SSD on it.

so:

What we have done with Apex is create a drive with internal raid0

So what does this mean in terms of speed? Well it depends on the sata controller on your motherboard but I can tell you I saw 180+ (actually touched 200) reads and 140+ writes on ICH8m (OCZ DIY Laptop), and on my HP Pavillion 9000 which uses an NVidia chipset, I am seeing 140writes and 160+ reads. Now i can't run any write tests as im actually real world testing this drive every day for 10 hrs, my system here has had 50 to 80GB of data on it at various times over this week while I have been testing... so when I bench it i get what you guys will see..IE this drive is in use.

I will post the ATTO from this laptop for you all, remember i saw higher than this on ICH8m, final speed is very controller dependent hence why I have been cautious

To finish....we are positioning Vertex for performance OS use, Apex will and does work fine for OS use also although helping the drive with a few OS tweaks makes it shine...Its a value part, one for those looking to build 4 with hardware raid or 2 with SB raid or even 1 drive with a few tweaks if they are on a budget.

We think Apex is a good fast budget solution and will suit many people.

I hope this is OK with you guys, i have tried to be honest here..i love the drive, its in a 2 yr old laptop running vista32 and it flies.