The Indilinx Everest turned out to be a surprisingly competent controller and has helped the Octane 256GB SSD become a powerful competitor for the category. Let's summarize our findings.

Starting from the sequential read and write performance, the Octane 256GB is competitive, although not class leading. We measured an average writing speed of more than 290MB/s and more than 460MB/s for reading , especially with files larger than 256 KB. The drive was significantly slower with smaller 4K compressible files in both read and write tests.

Random 4K read performance was among the highest in the group, but overshadowed by the weaker 4K write speed, which didn't top out as high as other competing models.

The big takeaway is that performance doesn't suffer when you throw incompressible data at the Indilinx Everest controller. When it came to writing incompressible data, the Octane shined over some popular SandForce-driven SSDs, in the sequential read / write tests and 4K random read tests. An exception is the drive's performance with incompressible 4K random writing tests. Generally, if you are working with a lot of media files, drives like the Octane 256GB SSD would win out moving them around.

It's clear that the Octane is worth owning, as it performs well for its class. It is currently priced at $340, matching the price of the very popular Vertex 3 SSD, which however still suffers from firmware issues according to user's reports. To that end, choosing the Octane would make sense, as its firmware has been developed in-house by OCZ (Indilinx). Of course, waiting a bit more to see how the upcoming Vertex 4 drive (Indilinx Everest 2) will perform would be also a thought, although its price is not expected to be any close to Octane's.