Although OCZ filed for bankruptcy and Toshiba is expected to acquire their assets, their business continues to operate normally. The company today announced the Intrepid 3000, OCZ's first in-house developed enterprise SSD. The SATA III-based SSDs are promising to deliver the industry's best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses. The series supports storage capacities up to 800GB and it is leveraging the Everest 2 Platform, a combination of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller with OCZ's proprietary firmware.

Performance figures quoted by OCZ include 520 MB/s for sequential reads (128K blocks), 470 MB/s for sequential writes (128K blocks), 91,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads (4K blocks) and 40,000 IOPS for random writes (4K blocks). In comparison to OCZ's previous SATA III enterprise drives, the Intrepid 3000 Series delivers five times faster sustained performance for 4K write operations and two times faster sustained performance for 4K read operations.

The proprietary Intrepid 3000 Series firmware is optimized to achieve consistent I/O responses and continues to perform at top speed regardless of whether data is in a compressed or uncompressed format. In this scenario, OCZ's new advanced flash management manages all of the housekeeping routines such as garbage collection, enabling the SSD to keep up with incoming read and write requests.

The Intrepid 3000 Series features a suite of endurance and reliability tools designed to extend NAND flash memory life. This includes:

- Multi-level BCH error correction coding (ECC) that corrects errors up to 85 bits per 2Kb of data while reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER);

- End-to-end data path protection that performs data integrity checks at every juncture where data is transmitted, received, processed and stored ensuring that corrupted data is detected and not propagated;

- In-flight data protection that prevents data loss in the event of a sudden power failure guaranteeing that the in-progress write operations complete and data is properly stored in SSD flash;

- Internal SSD RAID redundancy provides additional safeguards to supplement traditional ECC algorithms, and further reduce uncorrectable bit error rates;

- Lower write amplification by concatenating multiple write requests from the host while minimizing wasteful copy back operations of unaffected data sectors;

- 256-bit AES encryption compliance for data security (encrypting data in large 256-bit key sizes); and

- Additional flash management techniques such as dynamic and static wear-leveling, background garbage collection, TRIM support and system/storage monitoring via Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology (SMART).

The Intrepid 3000 Series supports the 2.5-inch form factor and is available in two configurations. The Intrepid 3600 drives utilize cost-effective Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND media while the Intrepid 3800 models feature high endurance enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND media. For read-intensive applications, such as online archiving, the Intrepid 3600 MLC Series guarantees one complete drive write per day for 5 years. For write-intensive or mixed workload applications such as OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP), OCZ's Intrepid 3800 Series guarantees five complete writes per day for 5 years.

Both configurations are available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB and 800GB usable storage capacity models.

All Intrepid 3000 Series models will be available through OCZ's resellers in the first quarter of 2014.

OCZ has assured that all product warranties will be honored although they can only promise that for the time being. This means that it is not sure wether Toshiba will take responsibility of OCZ's warranties, as the negotiations betwee the two companies are still on-going.