OCZ, PURVEYOR OF ALL things memory related, has announced its second generation Core products, just a month and a half after launching Gen 1. Core V2 SSD is the name of the game and the company has delivered some serious all-round improvements that many will welcome.

The new SSDs boast higher write speeds (98MB/s vs. 95MB) and considerably higher read speeds (170MB/s vs. 143MB/s) over the previous generation Core SSDs. Seek time has been cut down to anything from .2 to .3 milliseconds, compared to the .35 in the original. The new kit will include 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB versions – with a matching name – in order to avoid confusion between reported capacity and listed capacity.

OCZ has also added a mini-USB port for firmware updates “in the field”, which we guess will allow better support and diagnostics at service centres. Like the previous generation, these SSDs are RAID capable, meaning you can stick a couple of these in RAID 0 and spank your old spinning HDD.

Overall it looks like a new-and-improved everything, but we hope OCZ knows what it’s doing. The problem with being “pioneering” about things is that you seldom have the chance of making any money back on what you’re pitching – especially if you’re breaking ground price-wise.

The Core V2 SSD will be available Monday. Pricing was nowhere to be found… not even at the OCZ sales office. µ