OCZ Octane 1.13 Firmware Update: Improving 4KB Random Write Performance

Performance Over Time

I was curious to see if the latest firmware improved the Octane's worst case scenario. Although write amplification is definitely down, it's still a problem as the drive can get into a pretty nasty performance state when subjected to constant random writes. I suspect we'll need to see a more significant effort on the firmware side to get this addressed. Perhaps that's something we'll need Everest 2 for.

Final Words

I asked OCZ if the 1.13 firmware update offered any bug fixes or if it was purely for performance, the answer was the latter - it's a performance upgrade, nothing else. If you've got a 128GB or 256GB drive the upgrade is worthwhile. If you've got a 512GB drive however, you may want to hold off as there's no real benefit. The only exception would be if you've deployed your Octane in a server that's subjected to tons of random writes. I suspect even the bravest enterprise customers aren't too keen on adopting a fairly new consumer drive for use in their servers though.

The bigger news is that OCZ is clearly addressing one of the performance issues with Octane and the Everest platform. There's still more room to improve but this is an important step forward to hardening Everest. Reducing write amplification and improving random write performance will make Everest more feasible for use in enterprise workloads, although it may ultimately be Everest 2 that gets OCZ all the way there.

As far as Octane goes, I'm still in the wait and see mode with this drive. I have one Octane deployed in a system here that's used daily. The drive has been problem-free thus far but we've still got several months of testing before I'm totally comfortable. The competition is tough for sure (particulary after this last round of Intel and Samsung launches), but the market is growing quickly enough where there's still room for multiple controller vendors.