 Now this is something that's really interesting. In this unboxing I'm actually going to focus a little bit less on the product itself and a little bit more on the heritage of this particular product. So this is the OCC Octane SSD. This is a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second SSD drive which means it's very modern. Now unlike most of the modern SSDs out there, this does not use a Marvell controller. It does not use a San Force controller. So what does it use? This is one of the few products on the market that is actually unique and proprietary and well I shouldn't say proprietary because it complies to standards like SATA 3. But it's actually unique and different and has a value add that is in some way separated from what its competitors are able to do in the marketplace. And I'm going to explain what it has as soon as I can get this package opened. There we go. This uses an Indolink controller. And you go, oh Indolink controller, I remember those. But no, this is a new Indolink controller. So this uses the all new English Indolink Everest architecture which is an updated Indolink controller. So what happened to Indolink? Well they used to make controllers on their own and they used to be the kind of top dog. It was Indolink versus Intel in those days with you know jmicron having their stuttering issues. And then they kind of fell by the wayside when Sanforce released their SATA 2 competitor and then their SATA 3 drive just kind of came out of nowhere and blew absolutely everything away. So OCC acquired them and they've been quietly working on a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second chipset. So this is the Everest controller and what it does is unlike Sanforce, and one of the cool things about Sanforce, this is what was so revolutionary, particularly about the first Sanforce controller, the Sanforce controller compresses the data as it's being written to the drive and then decompresses it as it's being read from the drive. So that allows it to actually read and write more than it's actually even reading and writing. Which means that the performance of the drive is higher than the actual performance of the flash. Which is cool, right? However, there are limitations to that architecture. So some things that you're going to have to work with, some large files are not going to be very compressible. This is called non-compressible data. When you're working like a text document, it's very easy to compress. But not all multimedia type files, in fact there's a lot of files such as files that are compressed already. If something is zipped already, there's not a whole lot more compression that can be done. So non-compressible files perform significantly worse on a Sanforce drive than they do on competing drives. So what Indolinks has achieved here is they've made a controller that is focused on non-compressible data. Which means that no matter what usage scenario you're looking at, it will perform exactly the same, whereas a Sanforce drive performs better on compressible and not as well on non-compressible data. So hopefully that's enough information for you guys. So how well did they do? Basically, it is competitive with Sanforce on compressible data and beats it on non-compressible data, so I'd say yes, they achieved their goal. Very cool. It's also the first SSD that's available in capacities up to 1TB on a single controller, which is sort of an interesting fact, but probably irrelevant to most consumers. It uses MLC Flash. Okay, it has Trim support. It sure is heck better. It has RAID support, which also it sure is heck better. Ah, here we go. All-around performance and optimized for compressed files such as MP3s, JPEGs, RAWs, PSDs, OSX software. Interesting. And taking multimedia applications to the next level. So pretty much that's a way of saying what I said in a very long time in like one sentence, so way to go OCZ. My SSD is faster than your hard drive, comes with a cool little sticker. Totally standard drive, so it's 2.5", which means you've got your mounting holes here and here, your mounting holes here and here, here, here, and here, and here. You've got your SATA 3 6 gigabit per second interface here, there's your data, there's your power. And I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to. This is the Octane 128 gig. And as you go up in capacity, you do actually get more performance with these Octane drives. And thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the OCZ Octane as well as a little bit of a history lesson, I guess, about the San Force controller, the Indolence controller, and how the new generations of products stack up. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other compu...