OCZ's Z Drive puts 1TB of blazing SSD capacity in your PCIe slot: eyes-on

Here's a little something OCZ Technology cooked up just for CeBIT: a PCIe enclosure that'll contain 1TB worth of SSD storage with maximum read rates of up to 600MB/sec and maximum write speeds of up to 500MB/sec. Oh, and the sustained write speeds are right around 400MB/sec. Essentially, this device will contain four 256GB MLC-based OCZ SSDs along with 256MB of ECC DDR2 RAM; when slapped in one's desktop, they can choose to set it up as the boot disk or a slave. OCZ is also hoping to offer a 4TB edition by the end of the year, which is totally plausible given that 1TB SSDs are already a reality. The on-hand demo was just a mockup shell, but the finalized version shouldn't look much different than what's pictured in the gallery below. As for pricing and availability? It should hit the US of A in around six weeks for somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000. It's high-end, y'all.

OCZ's Z Drive puts 1TB of blazing SSD capacity in your PCIe slot: eyes-on

[Flaystus Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:49PM]

When is the contest to give one of THESE away?

[swilson31 Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:05PM]

pretty sure if one of these came into the engadget office, the first person to see the box would be the contest winner

[TomTom2010 Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:34PM]

yeah, that sure will fix the economy.

[tommychan123hotmailcom Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:37PM]

This thing must hungry for power, global warming is gonna worsen

[Danrarbc Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:50PM]

"This thing must hungry for power, global warming is gonna worsen"

A) The phrase is now 'climate change'
B) SSDs typically use a lot less power than hard drives. This card even with 4 drives inside likely uses less than one normal hard disk,

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:36PM]

"pretty sure if one of these came into the engadget office, the first person to see the box would be the contest winner"

Yeah, because there's totally an 8x PCIe slot in a MacBook Pro or iPhone :D

[Erb Posted Mar 5th 2009 5:46PM]

@eggothewaffle You sir, win 1 internet.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 6th 2009 8:56AM]

@eggothewaffle

You sir hit the nail on the head. +1

[KAL326 Posted Mar 6th 2009 12:37PM]

@eggothewaffle

No, but that would be a pretty reason to invest in a Mac Pro if they didn't already have one.

[Marco le Polo Posted Mar 26th 2009 5:30PM]

@eggothewaffle

lol

[Gordon Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:51PM]

Holy fuck. Want.

[WKCptton Posted Mar 6th 2009 2:32PM]

HOLY...SOMEONE PUT SH*T IN MY PANTS!!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:52PM]

is that case spray painted?

[FThorn Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:29PM]

Looks like pre-seasoned cast iron cookware to me.

[kaimonkey Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:41PM]

^ that CANT be good for head dissipation =\

[paul34 Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:02PM]

Yes, do not want to dissipate too much head...

[kaimonkey Posted Mar 5th 2009 7:15PM]

damn.......heat ..i meant heat =\

[glennS Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:53PM]

Brings back memories of the old "Hard drive on an ISA card" cards.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 6:52PM]

OK, so PCI-E interface for connection to the motherboard? Mobo manufacturers are going to have to rewrite their BIOSs to accomodating Boot to PCI Express, not to mention getting your OS installer to recognize that your HD is attached to a PCI Bus. I dont see it being around for long and i just see it as a proof of concept that you can make a 1TB hard drive array with enough SSD drives.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 8:56PM]

That's not an issue Setnev. This is basically a PCIe RAID card with the hard drives already on the card itself.
It'll detect as a drive and boot up just like any other PCIe RAID card.

[bhtooefr Posted Jun 2nd 2009 1:05PM]

Setnev: There's been BIOS support for this card since 1981 - if you could adapt a PCIe card to a 1981 IBM PC, it'd work, thanks to the option ROM facility IBM designed into the BIOS way back then. This is how you can add a SATA card to a machine, or you can boot from ethernet or a RAID controller, it just uses an option ROM.

[Techie Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:55PM]

Sane? I guess you're rich too huh....

[astrocramp Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:56PM]

This looks like the fusion i/o thing...for $1500 i think i may actually buy one of these. HDD data access is the one thing that you routinely wait around for on a computer these days.

[Vidikron Posted Mar 5th 2009 5:08PM]

LOL... I think I'd rather buy a $100 1TB spinner, wait a few extras second for a program to load, and keep the other $1400.

[jecks Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:56PM]

does that actually fit into computer cases? because it sure wouldn't fit into mine.

[Flaystus Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:58PM]

Looks about the size of my BFS 9800GTX+ which BARELY fits in my PC

[Shan Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:23PM]

My thoughts exactly! That is way too big even if it does have 4 SSDs inside. I'm sure they could be a bit more efficient with the space. When you buy something like that - you don't need the added worry of if it will fit. They really need to overhaul the size down a bit. Hopefully that will happen by v2 or v3 when the price will also be reduced - if no one else is selling them by then.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:58PM]

OMGWTFBBQ i'm going to put two of these in my rig for Far Cry 2

[PhoenixFox Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:08PM]

I wasn't aware that Far Cry 2 needed 2TB of disc space with 600MB/s read speed...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 24th 2009 9:02AM]

Because a large hard drive will dramatically increase your graphics output.

:|

[bingo bob Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:58PM]

wow..... its like 1988 all over again!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

http://wiki.museo8bits.es/wiki/images/thumb/6/6b/Hardcard.jpg/300px-Hardcard.jpg

[idlemind1999 Posted Mar 5th 2009 2:58PM]

Looks like painted balsawood

[digitalnoah Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:10PM]

This is definitely a hand made prototype model. Probably they are waiting on tooled plastic parts to come in and they whipped up this chipboard crap-box for the show.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:01PM]

I'll stick with my old-fashioned HDD until these SSD prices get remotely affordable.

[looselycoupled Posted Mar 5th 2009 6:23PM]

Actually, the ultra-fast OCZ Vertex is not that expensive... like $3 per GB

[excelsium Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:03PM]

Hmm maybe this would boot vista in 10 seconds or less?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:07PM]

10 seconds? This would boot Vista before you thought about turning on your computer.

Probably would boot before you even knew what Vista was.

Possibly even before you were born.

[Paul C Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:16PM]

no. its physically, chemically, and biologically impossible to do such a task

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:33PM]

Good question.

My guess is it would make less difference than you think. The BIOS would still take 20 seconds before you got the initial boot up when this would engage. It would speed the later part up some, but all of the DHCP, driver initialization, etc etc stuff would still take however long it takes.

I'd love for somebody to find out though.

Would be nice if one of those hard core sites like ExtremeTech or Tom's Hardware or whatever would actually do testing like that, e.g. a completely fake "hard disk" made from RAM and a battery that would be faster than any hard disk ever will be--then test things like boot time, application launch, etc and see what kind of difference the hard disk performance can make.

[excelsium Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:39PM]

Seen it done with windows xp .. booting from a ramdisk in less than 10 sec.

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/insane-8-second-windows-xp-bootup-ram-disk/1807776156

[Goran Posted Mar 8th 2009 7:55PM]

Nope, it won't.
I have 4 OCZ Core V2 SSD 30GB drives in quad RAID 0. Average read speed I have on the Core i7 system o/c-ed to 4GHz are 489 MB/s. Vista or Win 7 beta boots in 18 seconds (not counting BIOS posting etc).
Z Drive is only 22% faster, plus there is some time during boot attributed to pure CPU work (system working on starting services etc). At best, the Z Drive will boot in 14 seconds.

[Legend Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:05PM]

Goodbye gigabyte I-Ram, Hello...OCZ...whatever it's called...

[digitalnoah Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:06PM]

When I read about the fusion I/O device a few months back, I got really excited. Recently I specced 4x SSD drives and a hardware RAID controller at New Egg for really fast read/write speeds on my Workstation. I chose four 30GB drives ($100/ea) and a nice Areca controller ($300) for a 120GB rig that could read and write about 400-600MB per second. To get this 1GB rig for $1500 is actually a crazy good bargain, cause my idea would have cost me $700 and it would have had only 1/8 the storage capacity. Plus, its nice to have it all packaged into one device without any wires.

Count me in when these come out. And hopefully they make a 0.5TB version for half as much.

[superhobo Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:14PM]

" To get this 1GB rig for $1500 is actually a crazy good bargain,"

Read that again after 5 years.

Actually, read that again now, you said 1GB.

[digitalnoah Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:19PM]

Not all GB are the same. For high-bandwidth functions (like saving a 2GB photoshop file) it sucks to wait minutes when it could take seconds. I would pay $1000 for 30GB of storage if it were high enough speed. Buying a $100 harddrive that writes 50MB/sec isn't worth it to me.

In two years when SATA is dead and data is running through the PCI-E lanes, I'll be a happy camper. Imagine having 4 of these cards in RAID-5 and having 3GB of secure data with 1.5GB/sec write speeds. I'd pay an arm and leg for that.

[digitalnoah Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:19PM]

and yes, TB is the right size.

[gerrrg Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:07PM]

That price will be 1/2 this time next year, and it'll still be too expensive. But that's okay, because eventually I suspect no one will want revolving platters to store sensitive archives. Another 5 years and we're kosher.

[Augmented Insanity Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:10PM]

Are these effected by violent acts of shouting?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:11PM]

But can they load Crysis?

[toast Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:30PM]

With hardware of this calibre becoming a reality, comments like yours will soon be redundant.



Or they'll release Crysis 2....