For the entirety of 2008 and a good portion of 2007, OCZ has seemingly been a company on a mission to prove that they are leading the pack in terms of innovation. Looking at some of their new products would make it blatantly clear that they have indeed earned that position. Currently, OCZ has no less than 4 active series of solid state hard drives. The most well-known of these, the Core series, has been updated and is seeing much better performance than what was observed when they first launched. The Core series is aimed at the mainstream market. The Solid series is a higher-capacity offering that is meant for the value market and offers great performance and includes a mini-USB jack for easy firmware upgrades. The Vertex series is the latest product that has onboard cache and will be the high-performance entry. Read/write speeds are reportedly around 200/160MB/s which is pretty impressive.

Of course the best part of OCZ's SSD offerings is their pricing. During black friday you could pick up an SSD for around $30, and you can still get the 30GB Solid series drive for about $70. Aggressive pricing had driven down the cost of SSD's tremendously and most of it is thanks to OCZ. Although there are arguments about the performance of some of their SSD's, there is one thing everyone can agree on: OCZ is good for the SSD business.

The company also recently launched the first eSATA/USB compatible flash drive. The Throttle series flash drive fits both form factors and offers tremendous transfer rates of up to 90MB/s. It comes in various flavors up to 32GB and seems to be a great option for a backup hard drive at this capacity. Also in the NAND flash market, the OCZ Slate Series ExpressCard is basically a removable hard drive. It is designed to fit in an ExpressCard slot of a notebook and allow for easy transfer of data from one machine to another. There is also a mini-USB port on it so it can potentially be used as an external hard drive as well. There is a limited consumer base for this, since it requires that you have an ExpressCard slot on your notebook, but certainly no other products exist like this.

Lastly in the DRAM space, OCZ is currently offering the best prices on the fastest available triple-channel DDR3 memory kits for Intel's new Bloomfield/X58 platform. OCZ's CAS latencies are significantly lower (7 vs 9) than their competitors, and a quick trip to Newegg will reveal pricing is also superior. Polling system integrators in the area reveals that OCZ is having a very hard time keeping these parts in stock because the demand is so high.

It is great to see a company like OCZ being successful despite of the abysmal worldwide market. It just goes to show that innovation and diversification are the best ways to stay alive when the times get tough.