OCZ SSD 32GB Solid State Hard Disk

 

OCZ always seem to take the middle ground when it comes to packaging design – never going for any outlandish or garish designs and similary never under dressing their products either. The OCZ SSD in its blue and black printed cardboard box is testament to this and presents itself as both a professional and enthusiast marketed product.

 

 

 

Despite the Solid State Drive being able to withstand a full 1500G shock, OCZ have seen fit to encapsulate the device in a custom moulded styrofoam block that protects the disk from impact at any angle. Included in the box is a basic instruction manual with no other accessories or additional extra’s. To be honest we would have liked to have seen at least a silver SATA-II cable to match the device or maybe even a 2.5″ to 3.5″ mounting bracket. But nope, nothing.

 

  

 

If there’s one area we most definitely cant fault OCZ, it is in the style of the device. Coming fully enclosed in a brushed silver Aluminium casing with raised OCZ logo and “Solid State Drive” wording, the drive looks simply gorgeous and gives a feeling that your hard earned cash has been spent on something more than just a PCB full of memory chips.

 

 

As expected, the data and power connectors are located in the same positions you would normally find them on standard 2.5″ hard disks. This allows the OCZ SSD to be a direct slot-in replacement for any SATA based laptop hard disk, offering increased battery life and a reduced chance of data loss should the laptop be dropped .

 

 

Opening the device reveals a standard green PCB adorn with eight Samsung K9WBG08U1M NAND chips each with a 4GB storage capacity.  Very little information is available on the net regarding these chips, but quite interestingly when plugging the OCZ SSD drive into an SATA port it appears in device manager as a Samsung drive with no mention of OCZ whatsoever.

 

Now let’s find out what hardware configuration and test methods we are going to be using..