Coming down the pipe: OCZ's latest SSD iteration, the OCZ Summit Series SSD pushes MLC solid state technology to the next level with a larger 128mb buffer size and using Samsung's state of the art controller chipset and NAND flash modules (vs 64mb buffer and Infilinx controller used in the already admirably performing Vertex series.)

As we've seen before in OCZ's lineup: The larger 120GB and 250GB SSD's have different, better, faster peak Write specs than the smaller 60GB model. (200Mbps writes for the larger drives vs. 125Mbps for the 60GB) -- tho all claim 220Mbps Reads. These larger size drives aren't shipping yet at Amazon.com, but the 60GB version is listed as 1-3 day shipping.

Tags: summit series, OCZ Summit

Patriot's new FUSION series SSD with 64MB of DRAM cache is the next in their lineup. As with other new models of solid-state disk drives arriving for Summer 2009 --upping the amount of the onboard DRAM cache buffer is giving SSD manufacturers an easy way to increase overall write performance and data transfer rates.

Much as with traditional spinning platter drives - and the use of cache in general when it comes to computers - cache behaves rather predictably: A little cache helps ALOT, a bit more helps a bit more incrementally -- but at some point the performance curve tends to flatten out very quickly.

Part Number	Description	UPC
PFZ256GS25SSDR	Patriot Fusion 256GB SSD	0879699008242
PFZ128GS25SSDR	Patriot Fusion 128GB SSD	0879699008211
PFZ64GS25SSDR	Patriot Fusion 64GB SSD	0879699008204

Tags: SSD Cache, SSD Buffer, SSD Bottleneck