UPDATED Controller chipsets are difficult to get right, but OCZ pulls it off.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The divine benevolence in question is the belated and very much awaited arrival of TRIM support when operating SSDs in RAID arrays.

The SSD controller wars are hotting up with the arrival of the new OCZ Vertex 4 256GB. It's powered by OCZ's new in-house Everest 2 controller chipset, so how does it perform?

The arrival of the new OCZ Octane 512GB is the most intriguing development in SSD technology in the last few years. The key theme here is high quality SSD controllers and the firmware that goes with them. They've proven very difficult to develop.

The Vertex 3 is back with more IOPS

Professional-class SSDs don't come any quicker

Is the Agility 3 SSD all that agile?

If you thought the first generation of SandForce controllers was impressive, then the second generation will simply blow you away.

A different take on the standard SSD. And it wont break the bank

We've had a play with OCZ's first take on the PCIe-based SSD, the OCZ RevoDrive 120GB and you could colour us fairly impressed. A little while later and the OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB has found itself slotted into our test bench.

It's fashionable among the technologistas to grumble about the quality and performance of solid-state drive controller chipsets. But controllers aren't the only problem with SSD performance; increasingly, storage interfaces are creating a bottleneck. Enter the OCZ IBIS HSDL 240GB, an ultra-high performance SSD designed to sidestep performance issues related to the SATA I/O interface.

Up until now, SSDs have had one sided performance, reading files very quickly but being much slower to write data down onto the drive. Thanks to the new SF-1200 controller, the Agility 2 is has almost symmetrical read/write performance in sequential tasks, and its handling of multiple small writes is ridiculously quick.

OCZ's Vertex 2 is an outstanding drive on almost all counts whether its performance or value for money that you're after, but unless you're setting up a dedicated multimedia workstation for cutting your first HD feature, you should probably save your money and opt for the 60GB version instead. And trust us, you'll be very, very happy with your choice.

Can OCZ's new Sandforce equipped SSD perform

A small capacity SSD but is 32GB too limited for a single drive?

Reasonably big, but unfortunately not too clever

Once again, the best things in life are far from free