Our first SSD test

Introduction to Solid State Drives

The allure of solid state disks (SSDs) has been shining on the horizon for what seems like years now.  As we mention in nearly every hard drive review we do, the hard drive in your computer is the last major mechanical device left in the PC and is one of the key bottlenecks in overall system performance.  That is why when a company like Western Digital comes out with a new super-high-speed SATA hard drive we all get VERY excited about it. 

What SSDs offer us is a "faster" storage solution that is closer to your typical thumb drive in design than any hard drives you have now.  Whereas current generations of hard drives are platter-based, where magnetic platters spin at high speeds (~7200 RPM) with a floating head reading data off of them like a record, SSDs are just non-volatile flash memory.  The memory cards for you cell phone and camera are other examples of flash memory though the SSDs we are talking about here for PC storage have typical SATA interfaces are in general faster.

Today we are going to be reviewing the OCZ Technology 64GB SSD hard drive as our first tested SSD to see how these devices will live in the world of modern PCs.

OCZ's 64GB SSD 2.5" Drive

To all outward appearances the OCZ 64GB SSD drive looks like just about any 2.5" hard drive.  Drives of this size are typically used in notebooks rather than desktop computers though there is nothing holding you back from installing something like this in your own machine - though you might want a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter of some kind.

It's definitely a nice looking hard drive, for what that's worth.  The brushed aluminum exterior definitely lends itself to a high-tech look.

The label on the other side of the drive doesn't have a whole lot of information: near the bottom you can see it as a 2.5" 64GB SSD SATA.

The connections on the drive are your typical SATA data and power plugs; they are properly placed for installation into a notebook computer where the power and data connections are fixed and don't use adjustable cables.

Finally, just to get one more picture of the drive into the review, here is the 2.5" OCZ 64GB SSD drive resting on the larger 3.5" WD SE16 750GB hard drive.

Next Page - Testing Methodology and System Setup