OCZ Archives - VR World

Exclusive, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News

Toshiba Rebrands OCZ Storage Solutions

In December 2013, Toshiba announced the acquisition of OCZ Technology, Inc. for $35 million. Several weeks later, Japanese giant completed the acquisition and rebranded the company “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company”. This brand continued to exist until recently, when Toshiba moved to streamline its branding position on the market. We got in touch with the OCZ PR team to learn that “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company” is no more, with the parent company positioning “OCZ” as its sub-brand, similar to the branding segmentation between Kingston and HyperX, or Micron and Crucial. OCZ will continue to exist as an independent brand, wholly owned

Breaking, Enterprise, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

Seagate Presents World’s Fastest SSDs

Seven months ago, Steve Luczo (CEO) stated that “there is no one that is using SSDs for storage.” This statement still haunts Seagate Technologies, LLC to this date, even though it was out of context. “I mean, maybe at the margin for replacing boot drives… I mean, maybe one or three per cent of the hierarchy is SSDs for storage. Most of our flash product is actually not hanging off the storage bus, it is fast memory.” As it usually goes, the dismissive statements come at the time when you know that you have a good thing coming down the line, but you need to hold the fort.

Gaming, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News

OCZ Gaming Unveils Streamer Sponsorship Program

Gaming is one of largest, if not becoming the largest form of entertainment, and last several years witnessed the rebirth of PC gaming, as gaming consoles cannot keep up with the system demands of new games. As such, the way to advertise to new audiences is shifting, with a barrier of entry becoming so attractive that anyone with the right mindset and dedication can do it. Over a decade ago, I met Jonathan Wendel, who went on to become a first pro-gamer to earn over a million dollars, and creating a successful collaboration with different hardware vendors with his ‘Fatal1ty’ brand (Abit, ASRock, Creative Labs, OCZ etc.). Now,

Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Reviews, Storage Reviews

PREVIEW: OCZ’s RevoDrive 400 Looks Like a Great SSD

Ever since the company got acquired by Toshiba, OCZ Storage Solutions focused on more performance for the enthusiasts and expanding the market share in the fast-growing segment of enterprise storage. On CES 2016, OCZ introduced several new products, basing them on NVMe PCI Express Gen 3 standard. For the enthusiasts, OCZ launched RevoDrive 400 Series. Unlike RevoDrive 350 (which featured non-removable memory on the add-in PCIe card), the all-new RevoDrive 400 now comes as an M.2 form factor product with an additional PCIe x4 add-in card – very similar to Kingston’s HyperX Predator. By moving to M.2 form factor, RevoDrive 400 can now be installed not just in desktop, but

Memory & Storage Space, VR World

OCZ Launches Vertex 460A SSD

It’s the same SSD as the Vertex 460, except for new NAND.

Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

Yet to be Announced OCZ ARC 100 Solid State Drives Make Appearance Online

OCZ has yet to give its upcoming line of ARC 100 SSDs the official unveiling, but it looks like two retailers have beat OCZ to it. First spotted by Legit Reviews, both Amazon.com and Scan.co.uk have posted drives in the series online for pre-order. Drives in the series will be available in 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB capacities and are capable of sequential read speeds of 490 MB/s and reach write speeds 430 MB/s (400 MB/s for the 120 GB model) and 80,000 IOPS. The SSD series sports a 2.5-inch form factor, a Barefoot 3 M10 controller and 19nm MLC NAND chips supplied

Cloud Computing, Enterprise, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

SanDisk to buy FusionIO for $1.1 billion, Consolidation Continues

SanDisk and FusionIO have entered into an agreement where SanDisk will purchase all of FusionIO and its assets to the tune of $1.1 billion in cash, once again continuing the consolidation of the NAND flash market into fewer bigger companies. This announcement is likely a response to Seagate’s recent acquisition of the NAND flash division of Avago which included the SandForce controller division. However, the real truth is that FusionIO is not anywhere near a consumer flash storage company and most of their customers are professionals or enterprise while most of SandForce’s products are consumer focused. I’m sure SanDisk would have loved to buy both

Business, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space

Corsair to launch SSD drives ala Fusion-io and OCZ?

Recently, Corsair Memory launched its first Solid State Disk, with 128GB capacity. Since the performance wasn’t earth shattering (as opposed to already-established memory, power supplies and memory sticks), I expected that this first product was nothing else but tapping into the highly lucrative market. However, after reading the press release, a statement from John Carlton, Corsair’s VP of Marketing stood out like supernova in otherwise dark universe: “Our engineering team is currently hard at work on even higher performance and higher-capacity drives with read and write-speeds expected to be in in excess of 200MB/s. Even more exciting is a version for the hardcore enthusiast that

Companies, Hardware, Intel

OCZ rolls out a low-latency, low-voltage DDR3-2000 for Core i7

OCZ launches low-latency DDR3-2000 memory kit.

3D, Business, CPU

Biohazard Annihilation F.A.T.E.: Life with a Ferrari

Supercars, supercomputers… they all have things in common. Regular cars and regular computers can do things just like supercars and supercomputers. But, there is something special in owning something “super”. Biohazard Annihilation F.A.T.E. is member of supergamingcomputers. Is it good enough?

Business, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Mobile Computing

OCZ first to market with blazing fast eSATA flash drive

OCZ is the only company that experimented with alternative interfaces for flash drives such as FireWire 800. Today, the company launched eSATA flash drive. Under the name Throttle eSATA, this “eStick” is offering fantastic performance, 90 MB/s read and 30 MB/s write.

Business, Gaming, Hardware, Software Programs

OCZ Brain-thingie hits $99 for Black Friday/Cyber Monday

One of major obstacles that any new revolutionary technology has to overcome is the question of affordability. Recently, I published my four-months-and-counting experience with the OCZ’s NIA, and in the end of the review, my only advice to OCZ was to target $99 price-point as the magical mark. Earlier today, a good friend of mine from Sacramento pinged me and told me that NIA hit $99 on Newegg after MIR check comes at your door. I went to Newegg and checked it out, and is true – now you can get NIA for $119.99 with a $20.00 check “is in the mail” http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=26-100-006 . Now,

Gaming, Hardware, Software Programs, Uncategorized

Is OCZ’s NIA the most important thing in IT industry?

Two weeks ago, a very high, S-level exec from the automotive industry asked me about upcoming technologies, since he didn’t understand the importance of new interfaces that are coming in mainstream computing. I was shocked, since operating the car interface while driving should require minimum attention. Drive on the highway in Germany at 150 mph and play with BMW’s i-Drive, Mercedes’es non-touch COMMAND or Audi’s Futuremark-designed MMI3D and you’ll see where you feel the safest (hint, the one that cannot be benchmarked, but still comes from a benchmark maker ;-). There is an obvious need for development of true user-friendly computer interfaces. In this long

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, CPU, Graphics, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Microsoft, Software Programs

New “nForce for AMD” chipsets take shape under GeForce name

Last week, Chinese site Expreview.com published a story about the new generation of nForce chipsets for AMD processors. We managed to find more details through course of the weekend. For starters, the lineup will consist out of three (not two) chipsets with various capabilities. MCP82-S1, MCP82-S2 and MCP82-S3 will round the lineup, all targeting their respective markets (high-end, mainstream and entry-level). The S1 and S2 will support SLI, while S3 targets lucrative OEM/ODM deals – our sources indicate that this variant will be pitched as a successor to GeForce 6150 line that conquered many Dells, HPs and Acers out there. MCP82-S1 targets the high-end, with

VR World

OCZ’s brain thingie is going 64-bit… finally

When OCZ Technology launched somewhat revolutionary gaming peripheral dubbed NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator), I could only find one flaw: lack of 64-bit drivers. From personal experience, running 32-bit Vista is nothing short of pain in that specific part of human body – I’ve been using 32-bit XP and 64-bit Vista dual boot since November 30, 2006. Yes, through all the horrid moments of not having Vista drivers for 8800GTX until late Q1’07. Starting today, NIA finally has 64-bit driver support. According to Dr. Michael Schuette, “The migration to the Vista 64 environment with the unified ver. 2.0 software suite required a complete recoding of the