The slim drive retails in a plastic transparent package:

The Octane uses the newer SSD case design, with a plastic cover and metal plate. The stickers and branding are identical to the previous versions of the drive, and OCZ has chosen to make use of orange and black colors for the series.

The drive uses a SATA III interface, which offers a maximum data rate of 6Gbps. The front of the drive features a standard SATA power and data connection, with no debug pins next to the connector.

The drive measures 99.8 (L) x 69.63 (W) x 9.3 mm (H) and weighs 38g.

Disassembling the 256GB Octane SSD will reveal Intel 29F32B08JCME2 32GB 25nm synchronous NAND pieces and of course, the new Indilinx IDX300M00-BC controller.

The SSD can be easily installed in your chassis. The procedure is no different than installing any other drive. Connect the SATA and power cable, and you are good to go.

After installation, Intel's software in our test PC identified the drive as "OCZ-OCTANE" with firmware v1.13, and the available capacity was 244,198 MB:

More information about the drive is provided by the CrystalDiskInfo utility and the OCZ Toolbox:

For better performance under Windows Vista, you may need to disable any HDD optimizations such as drive indexing, prefetch superfetch disabled and defragmentation.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support the TRIM function, which the operating systems use when they detect that a file is being deleted from an SSD. Here is how it works: When the OS deletes a file on an SSD, it updates the file system but also tells the SSD via the TRIM command which pages should be deleted. At the time of the delete, the SSD can read the block into memory, erase the block, and write back only pages with data in them. This will result in no performance degradation for writes because the pages are already empty. As you realize TRIM only improves performance when you delete files and not when you overwrite an existing file.

You may also consider enabling the AHCI mode, which could give your SSD a little extra performance boost.