OCZ Z-Drive

Zarf

Zarf

Zarf

Soldato
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11 Jul 2007
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Their showing it off at CeBit, looks awesome.

Able to brag with a few good solid state drives, OCZ has decided to up the ante at CeBIT and for that it brought and showcased the Z Drive. OCZ's storage device has a PCI-Express x8 connection interface and boasts four 256GB (MLC-equipped) SSDs in RAID 0 to sum up to 1TB, and 256MB of cache. The Z Drive requires extra power and has declared read and write speeds of up to 600 MB/s and 500 MB/s.

Put into a system with a Core i7 965 EE CPU and an Asus P6T motherboard, the Z Drive, as seen below, reached a maximum transfer rate of 712 MB/s. The catch here is obviously the price as the quad-SSD device will cost about $1500.
Click to expand...

Time will tell IOPS wise, but if they do a 256 or even 500GB version I could well be very tempted as the prices aren't extreme either - the 1TB version works out at 1.23GBP/GB inc VAT, which I could justify at those speeds.
 
seems a bit slow to me, i mean someone else posted a raid 0 setup with 2 ocz drives getting 500mb read and about 400mb write roughly... so 4 of them should be nearer the GB/sec read and about 700-800 write.
 
Couldn't you just achieve the same thing with a decent raid card and 4 budget SSDs? I'm sure someone posted here a while ago with a bunch of OCZ Core series drives bolted onto a dedicated raid card, and he was getting constant 800MB/s transfer rates; the bottleneck was the processor on the raid card itself.

It's an expensive way of doing it, but I bet it's cheaper than this z-drive.
 
SlyReaper said:
Couldn't you just achieve the same thing with a decent raid card and 4 budget SSDs? I'm sure someone posted here a while ago with a bunch of OCZ Core series drives bolted onto a dedicated raid card, and he was getting constant 800MB/s transfer rates; the bottleneck was the processor on the raid card itself.

It's an expensive way of doing it, but I bet it's cheaper than this z-drive.
Click to expand...

Nope, way more expensive. Don't forget thats a full Terabyte of storage there for £1.23/GB total.
Budget SSD's are still over £2/GB, and a quality raid card capable of >700MB sustained will cost you around £80+cables atm for a perc 5/i on ebay, or much more to buy something new.
You'd be getting close to twice as expensive to make a DIY solution.

Like i said, if they can bring out a 256gb version at around £300, they'll have a real winner on their hands - it's pretty much what most enthusiasts are waiting for - enough space to have their OS and any Games they are currently playing.
 
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Found some more info, good and bad -
Looks like all they've done is sandwich a Highpoint RocketRaid 3520 and 4 OCZ Corev2 drives between a couple of heatsinks. The 3520 is a very capable (and expensive, £350-£400) controller bought separately, which is the good news, The bad news is that $1500 is just the starting point, and price range up to $4000 depending upon capacity.
I'm going to assume that $1500 would only pay for a 256GB version, and this means it's 4 times more expensive than i previously thought, so no bargains here.
 
It's a nice idea when you consider the limit of onboard raid. But the card is a tad too large for my liking lol.

ocz_zdrive_1.jpg
 
when you think of the size of a current 128GB/256GB SSD its basically 4 drives encased into a plastic casing and put on a pci-e board.
 
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