INTRODUCTION

   Solid state drives may have been around in the consumer market for roughly 8 years now but they are still considered to be amongst the hottest PC/MAC hardware components aimed towards people who are after something more in terms of reliability and performance compared to regular mechanical drives. Certainly although once such drives were very popular mostly amongst gamers and professionals due to their price decrease over the past 2-3 years they've become a lot more mainstream thus you can find them even in low-cost desktop systems and notebooks. Still not SSDs have the same target audience not only because of their performance, capacity and price but also because of their durability and today we'll be taking a look at the latest model launched by OCZ the ARC 100 which always according to them it excels on all four.

   OCZ Storage Solutions – a Toshiba Group Company is a leading provider of high performance client and enterprise solid-state storage products and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation. Offering a complete spectrum of solid-state drives (SSDs), OCZ Storage Solutions leverages proprietary technology to provide SSDs in a variety of form factors and interfaces to address a wide range of applications. Having internally developed firmware and controllers, virtualization, cache and acceleration software, and endurance extending and data reliability technologies, the Company delivers vertically integrated solutions enabling transformational approaches to how digital data is captured, stored, accessed, analyzed and leveraged by customers.

   It's been quite a while since OCZ released the ARC 100 line of SSDs (roughly 7 months ago) so to make up for that on our test bench we have the 480GB model which is the highest capacity of that line. Under the hood of the new ARC 100 line we find the latest A19nm MLC NAND flash by Toshiba paired with an Indilinx/OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller. Now as many of you are aware OCZ took over Indilinx a few years back so thanks to their acquisition by Toshiba just recently they are amongst the very few SSD manufacturers (along with Samsung and of course Toshiba now) that have in their hands both the controller (and the FW of course) and the NAND flash memory of a drive and although it may not sound important to many of you well it should since that means more competitive prices. As for the 480GB model which we have here OCZ reports an endurance rating of up to 20GB per day with read/write speeds of up to 490/450MB/s and random read/write throughout of up to 75.000/80.000 IOPS so let's see just how well it does against most of its immediate competition.