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

[Erb Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:11PM]

Compared to the $14,400 for the 320GB ioDrive Hell yeah.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/fusion-ios-iodrive-tested-worlds-fastest-storage-confirmed/

BTW, this is for servers imo. (Why isn't it low profile!!! Arg)

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:16PM]

Thanks for the memories: http://www.yesterpc.com/Hardware/Plus%20Hardcard20/item.htm

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:26PM]

I'd rock that if it was in the $200 range. But at a minimum $1370 premium over a standard HD, I'll spend the cash on my car or a bigger TV or something.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:26PM]

Wonder how this would play with the Avid systems at work....

[ChadC Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:03PM]

Well, considering it isn't made by Avid, I'm going to say it won't "work" at all. Evil Avid...

[Anthony909 Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:33PM]

Geez, hell yea its high end my MacBook Air was about that price......but i want one!!!!

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

These drives are well within justification extremes of a fair percent of readers that live in their parent's basement. :)

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

Ouch. I tipped Engadget on this like 3 days ago.
Even if it does start out at this price, in a year it will be down to affordable levels for gamers.

[Mile Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:49PM]

Oh, lah dee dah..."PCIe Slot", huh? "PCIe Hole" not good enuff for you upper class peeps!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:49PM]

Hey, they reinvented the hard card!

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

[jhoff80 Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:55PM]

Now, will this use the PCIe bus for actual transfers? Or is it just powered by the PCIe and will have a standard SATA2 connector?

Because if it uses the PCIe bus for data, I doubt any current BIOS would be able to recognize it to boot from.

[jhoff80 Posted Mar 5th 2009 3:57PM]

Never mind, I don't know what I was thinking. It probably reports to the BIOS as any standard RAID card would.

[pastrychef Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:03PM]

Mac bootable? If so, I'm in for one in my Mac Pro!

[Pingles Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:06PM]

$1500? In three years they'll be giving these away in boxes of cereal.

[Omoronovo Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:25PM]

You eat huge boxes of cereal.

[Decoy Posted Mar 5th 2009 9:17PM]

Robots eat silicon chips.

[CtrlBurn Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:25PM]

Here's a silly question:

What are typical SATA r/w speeds for 1TB drives these days? Specs for HDDs don't seem to list that metric, they just claim "3.0GB/s" because they use SATA 2, which is obviously not accurate for actual transfer speeds.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:45PM]

omg im in love! for that price and performance its worth it. i am getting this. maybe wait till they announce the 4TB version so maybe the price will drop a little tho

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 4:52PM]

I'll take two. As soon as they come down to about $150-$200 instead of $1500-$2000.

[excelsium Posted Mar 5th 2009 5:05PM]

The end of the era of significant loading times is getting close, hopefully they'll be in the next round of game consoles aswell.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 5:21PM]

So if the write speed is 500 mb/sec, that means that ANYTHING you transfer to it has to take around 20 seconds or less guaranteed! I guess that would require you to have something with a read speed of 500 mb/sec but you get the idea :)

[Jacob1 Posted Mar 5th 2009 7:16PM]

500 MB times 20 equals 10 GB.

it's actually 2,000 seconds

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 10:56PM]

lol, wow i feel like a dumbass... thanks for that

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

Stop comparing it to the Fusion ioDrive. This draws power over PCIe but transfers over SATA. That means over the slow-as-christmas SATA bus, then through the southbridge, etc, etc. It's not even remotely comparable to the Fusion ioDrive which operates with latencies in the MICROseconds not MILLIseconds. The Fusion ioDrive is closer to DRAM than it is to this NAND flash over SATA.

[Jacob1 Posted Mar 5th 2009 7:19PM]

If you bothered to look at the benchmarks, it reports speeds between 400 and 600 MB/sec. That's between 3.2 Gbit/sec and 4.8 Gbit/sec. SATA right now is 3.0 Gbit/sec. Do the math.

[surfen Posted Mar 5th 2009 6:08PM]

Nice, but the price needs to come down.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 7:39PM]

I've coveted the FusionIO Drive since I first heard about it. It makes sense to go the PCIe route rather than to wait for SATA to catch up, and considering the 640GB FusionIO Drive was released in late 2007 I think $2000 is VERY reasonable for a 1TB PCIe SSD.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 8:49PM]

This just looks like 4 SSD's with a RAID controller all running in a plastic enclosure that takes up two PCIe slots. And I'm sure the only reason for the PCIe interface is so the RAID controller can connect to the host (this is "Fusion like" not "Fusion Exact").

Want to see the difference of standard SSD's and Fusion just go read the Tom's Hardware review and see how the Fusion card, which has software running in the host kernal, kicks the pants off Samsung and Mtron SSD's in real world examples.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fusioinio-iodrive-flash,2140-7.html

Fusion just needs to ship the sub $1,000 ioXtreme already!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 8:52PM]

And here's the link to the workstation review in the same Tom's Hardware article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fusioinio-iodrive-flash,2140-6.html

[ChristopherW Posted Mar 5th 2009 9:44PM]

And you'll probably still get killed by improper partition alignment...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2009 10:48PM]

Price is amazing. Alternate: 4x160GB Intel SSDs + Raid card = DAAAAAAMN