Solid-state drive controller chipsets matter. A lot. That's why relatively small outfit OCZ acquired boutique controller manufacturer Indilinx with a view to making its own kit. But controller chipsets are also bloody difficult to get right, which is why Intel was forced to buy Sandforce controllers off the shelf when its own technology had fallen behind. But if Intel, with its bottomless pit of money, can't get it right, what hope for OCZ? It's time to find out, courtesy of the new OCZ Vector - the first OCZ drive to have a truly home-grown controller chipset. Yes, really. Previous OCZ drives like the Vertex 4 were branded as 'Indilinx Infused', but the Indilinx Everest 2 controller was in reality just re-badged Marvell silicon with custom firmware. Admittedly firmware is a very important part of the controller chipset package, but if you're not designing custom hardware, you can't truly claim to be cooking up the real in-house deal. But never mind, because that's finally arrived with the Vector SSD and its Barefoot 3 controller. As ever, full technical details of the chip's internal architecture are hard to come by: manufacturers simply don't release deep-dive data in the same way that CPU makers do. For the most part though, that makes sense - knowing how the innards of a CPU work can be important for software developers, whereas digging around in the oily bits of an SSD is rather more academic. Still, what do we know? Well, there's an ARM Cortex CPU core in there, but the
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