Sink your teeth into OCZ's ARC 100 SSD sizzler with tasty home-grown chips

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Stress buster

The drive only supports 256-bit AES encryption with no support for either Opal 2.0 or IEEE-1667 - so no Microsoft eDrive compliance nor any support for Third party management tools. But let’s face it, the drive is aimed squarely at the value end of the consumer market and is not something that’s going to figure on many SMB hardware want lists.

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Endurance of the drive is quoted as 22TB which works out to be 20GB of host writes per day for the duration of the 3 year warranty. Talking of warranty, OCZ supports the ARC 100 (and the Vertex 460A and AMD Radeon R7) with the company’s new ShieldPlus warranty.

This aims make the usual stress inducing procedure of trying to return a drive via the RMA service (or non-service as it seems some companies like to offer) as easy as possible. With ShieldPlus all that’s needed is the drive’s serial number (no proof of purchase is needed) and if the drive is proved to be dodgy, OCZ will replace it with a new one with no shipping charges involved.

Keenly priced and an enduring performance, or so it would seem

To keep the price as competitive as possible, OCZ hasn’t included any extras with the drive – for example drive bay brackets... or even software come to that. The lack of a bracket is not a problem but for a first time user some form of drive migration/cloning software could be helpful.

The Reg Verdict

OCZ, like any other company pitching a drive into this market segment, is going to have a tough time trying to beat Crucial’s MX100 but the ARC 100 gets mighty close. Its performance, particularly when it comes to write, is strong and it’s also a constant performer. It may not be as feature-rich as the Crucial drive, but it’s certainly worth serious consideration. ®