OCZ this week unveiled its Synapse Cache Series 2.5-inch solid state drive family. These aren't like most other SSDs in that they're not meant to stand on their own two feet. With the aid of built-in Dataplex cache software, OCZ's Synapse Series works alongside your existing hard drive and intercepts frequently accessed data to speed up system performance.

With its desktop DDR DRAM business now dead and buried, OCZ is making good use of its additional R&D resources by cranking out solid state drives at a breakneck pace, and the company's newly announced Z-Drive Revision 4 (R4) PCI Express storage solutions offer breakneck speeds for the enterprise. They also "significantly reduce total cost of ownership in the data center," OCZ says.

It took few a months for OCZ's acquisition of Indilinx to bear fruit, but it finally has with the unveiling of the Indilinx Everest SATA 3.0 SSD platform. The Everest controller features a dual-core ARM chip that supports the 6Gbps interface, up to 1TB of storage per controller, and according to OCZ, it's the first ASIC-based controller to enable state of the art triple-level cell NAND flash memory.

Solid state drives appear to be simple things. Slap some NAND flash memory on a circuit board, add a SATA interface, and cover the contraption with a case. There's a bit more to it than that, and for OCZ's enterprise PCI Express and SAS SSD solutions, the real magic happens in its proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA). Now in its second generation, OCZ says its revamped VCA supports even more enterprise features and is the next step in the evolution of virtualization layers for solid state storage.