What is the OCZ Arc 240GB?
It’s been a tough time for OCZ of late – the company delved into bankruptcy at the end of 2013 and was snapped up by Toshiba. It now operates as a subsidiary.
The Arc is one of the firm’s first big releases since the shake-up, and it arrives with a competitive price of £80 – on par with the Crucial BX100 and SanDisk Ultra Plus II, and only ten pounds cheaper than the impressive Crucial MX200.
OCZ Arc 240GB - Design
Given OCZ’s new owners, it’s no surprise that the Arc is built around Toshiba memory, with 19nm MLC chips deployed here. That means the Arc’s silicon may not offer the sheer speed of the 16nm parts inside Crucial’s drive, but 19nm chips come with their own advantages – they’re cheaper, for starters, and should prove more reliable.
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The 19nm memory is paired with a Barefoot 3 M10 controller. It’s one of two homegrown chips used by OCZ inside its current drives, although it’s the slower version here – the M10 is clocked to 352MHz, while the M00 inside more expensive SSDs runs at 397MHz.
OCZ rates this drive’s endurance at 20GB per day. That's about half the longer lasting consumer drives but it's still plenty for home PCs and gaming rigs as they just won’t use that sort of data. Only office systems with higher workloads will need demanding better endurance.
The Arc supports AES 256-bit encryption, but there’s no sign of TCP Opal 2.0 or eDrive protection. That’s not unusual for affordable SSDs, but they were both included in the Crucial MX200.