Technically,
OCZ outed this here PCI-Express SSD
way back at CeBIT in March, but it's just now making things super official. Now available with a fresh face and hard specifications, the Z-Drive is aiming to take on wares by firms like Fusion-io and provide blistering transfer rates to anyone who buys in. Essentially, this device removes the SATA bottleneck by employing the PCIe architecture and four Vertex controllers configured in four-way RAID 0 array. Curious about performance? Read speeds can hit upwards of 510MB/sec, while write speeds top out at 480MB/sec -- plenty respectable in our eyes. OCZ's planning to push these out in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, and while final pricing is still being kept under wraps, we're told that it'll be kept "competitive."
posted Apr 24th 2009 2:16PM
Now that`s gonna cost a fortune.
Also, surely if you could afford that and had an expensive system, wouldn't all your PCI-E slots be taken by graphics cards?
Not necessarily. Many high-end mobos have a PCI-E 4x slot above the first x16 slot. But many of them only have a 1x slot, which won't cut it for this.
Also, multiple video cards have diminshing returns, especially past 2 card setups, and virtually all high end boards have a 2rd PCI-e slot of 4 lanes or more. A lot of people can plunk down cash on a nice system, but they also have to spend that cash wisely, and even though the card may seem pricey, it's something that can survive several system upgrades, unlike a video card. This would dramatically decrease load times and improve pagefile performance
And then you can consider the non-gamers who dont necessarily need an uber video card, but may want insane R/W speeds for encoding, Photoshop scratch disks, etc.
some people are smart enough to realize you only need ONE video card....
So my ancient work computer is a dual 2.0ghz G5 from '05. It has 4 pci-e slots, a 16x, 8x, and two 4x. I've got a pair of video cards in it which is enough to drive 4 monitors, but that STILL leaves two 4x slots for an SSD like this.
I'd say most folks only have 1-2 video cards and should have high enough speed pci-e slots leftover.
It may cost an arm and a leg but it may be relatively well-priced.
And dont call me Shirley. :)
YES PLZ!
can you install windows on this? Do they show up as regular drives in the bios? im not clear on how it works.
The Motherboard and by extension windows will see it as RAID controller so there's nothing to stop you installing your OS on it.
I believe it shows up as a disk controller and a Hard drive in the Device Manager.
I would almost certainly think so. Booting off expansion cards is the norm in servers, and desktop systems have been fully capable of it since before I can remember (actually you get into REALLY old hardware and the HDDs WERE expansion slot devices).
Yeah, I thought that, aren't these PCI-E ports usually taken up by the first GPU?
So you get higher speeds from these? I was thinking of getting two OCZ SSDs and running them in Raid 0 when I upgrade to my i7 build.
If the specs are on point, these things are going to blow your two-SSD Raid 0 out of the water.
I'm kinda disappointed that the smallest is going to be 250GB, though. I'm plenty happy with 60GB for my OS partition, and would be willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks for these kinds of speed in that storage tier. The 250GB version is going to be well out of my price range, I suspect.
This is actually exactly what I did, and you will NOT be disappointed. I got an i7 running with 6 gigs of triple channel DDR3, and two OCZ Vertex SSD's in RAID 0. Windows 7 x64 cold boots in like 13 seconds. I don't even know what the hour glass for Windows 7 looks like; I've never seen it.
@Brice85
Are the OCZ Vertex SSDs SATA II?
brice, sounds epic. I've got a Mac Pro with RAID 0 on standard disks and the performance improvement is huge. I can only imagine SSD speeds... RAID 0 on SSD must be mind-boggling.
And Brice, as awesome as your setup is, look at the article: this Z-Drive is the equivalent of a 4-drive Vertex SSD Raid 0 array.
Like I said, it's gonna blow a "regular old Raid 0" setup out of the water.
That said, someone else posted a link that confirmed my fears; 250GB version looks to run a cool $1,500+.
OCZ, how about giving us a 60GB version for $300?
First GPU manufacturers take up 2 slots, now drive's want in too?
Isn't it about time for the motherboard and case factors to be redesigned to accommodate these slot hogs?
Anything requiring 2 slots is always a sign of: A. Product immaturity and B. An instant sign that it won't be widely adopted. It has always been this way and always will, and even after it has gone to a single slot wait for the second gen version as the first reduction is always problematic. I've been building PCs since the 386 and it has never been proven false.
@teasphere:
You just stated to be a PC pro and you didn't know that there are Mature, Widely Adopted gaming cards that take up 2 slots? Did you misunderstand my comment? Have you heard of nvidia and ati?
I've had several dual slot video cards that performed spectacularly well... I recently picked up a single slot card and I can't believe how loud it's fan is. I'll be getting dual slot video cards from here out.
I've been building PCs since the 286 and I wish they go (back) to a back-plane design with daughter-boards for the CPU, video, memory, etc. The motherboard should be a grouping of re-usable ultra-high speed data buss' for the components to communicate on. They use these in high end servers today, but IMHO, it would be better suited for a case that a user could simply swap out CPU cards during an upgrade if they wanted without having to replace the entire board. Obviously a limitation would be CPU to memory bandwidth, but you "could" put those on the same board and still achieve a simple PC upgrade just by swapping this out and leaving your other cards in the system.
I would like to try the new Windows 7 64 bit build 7100 on that.
Listed for $3899 CAD
http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=023228&cid=990.545
In that case, Im in for 3!!
I guess that's.....competitive?
@Roman, man you are on it. Dude I love the tech but come on almost 4k for 1TB of space.
Wait...just for the ocz drive!? :(
That's actually almost on target with the rest of the SSDs on $/GB (Just above 3.5 or so). 1TB of space is epic for that kind of speed.
Slightly more "competitive" http://www.orbitmicro.com/global/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=OCZSSDPCIE-1ZDRV1T&Submit=Search&osCsid=7bffbbbdafcab3d0ac14bb6a1043d6ea
Can you convert that to TARP funds for me?
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_z_drive_pci_express_ssd
@Jenkins:
It's not really more competitive, Canada Computers is in Canadian dollars..and the exchange rate is absolutely ****ed at the moment, so I think CC is actually cheaper, for Canadians anyway.
I'll take a 1TB SSD with a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface.
OooO, I feel ultra geeky saying that :)
wow
History repeating itself...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
this is just a stop gap messure until a new and quicker drive interface is found.
Im up for a b redesign
You have a small rectangular mb with hundreds of busses, then CPU, RAM, graphics, data cards, and other I/O goes in high speed serial busses.
I guess you could even use a slimline cd drive in a bus slot for odd.
It would cut down case size, and you could upgrade much easier.
Wow! Their "Vertex" SSDs uses controllers from Indilinux, not the crappy JMicron ones in their budget "Apex" line. Freaking 4x Indilinux controllers in RAID 0!
These will be expensive as hell!
aaargh!!!! im burned by the speed!
I'm not. I've got a pair of 120GB Vertex drives in RAID 0 and they do about the same numbers. Not sure why 4 couldn't do better...
interesting...
Hmm. I thought PCI Express was a read only interface.
How do you think PCI-E Sata cards work?
I always associate PCI-E with video cards which is a read only device. I've been so out of the loop I've never heard of PCI-E Sata.
"PCI-E with video cards which is a read only device"
Not sure that you are talking about... even with AGP, video cards used two way communications for advanced memory operations.
vampirehunter
Video cars are not read-only.. How do you think CUDA and other GPGPU processing gets the processed data from the GPU framebuffer back to the main memory (and CPU)...
When your product is the only of its kind on the market, you can charge whatever you feel like and it'll still technically be "competitive" pricing.
they are already for sale over @ frozencpu.com
250Gb == $1k - http://www.frozencpu.com/products/9007/hdd-ocz-08/OCZ_Z-Drive_PCI_Express_Solid_State_Drive_Card_-_250GB_-_OCZSSDPCIE-1ZDRV250G.html
500Gb == $2k - http://www.frozencpu.com/products/9008/hdd-ocz-09/OCZ_Z-Drive_PCI_Express_Solid_State_Drive_Card_-_500GB_-_OCZSSDPCIE-1ZDRV500G.html
1Tb == $3k - http://www.frozencpu.com/products/9009/hdd-ocz-10/OCZ_Z-Drive_PCI_Express_Solid_State_Drive_Card_-_1TB_-_OCZSSDPCIE-1ZDRV1T.html
dont believe me, look for yourself.
Rounding down is evil. ;)
More like...
250Gb == $1.33k
500Gb == $2.08k
1Tb == $3.24k
Rounding 1.33 to 1 is unforgivable (that's 25% off)
Wow.
for anyone running a high volume DB server, this will be a big deal.
i'm tempted......
"Rounding 1.33 to 1 is unforgivable (that's 25% off)"
LOL
I wonder how much of a performance hit these would take if it wasn't in 4 in a RAID 0 configuration. (I know I know not talking Performance anymore)
I can already see people buying 3 or 4 of these and making other RAID configs. But let's take this to another level. How about a PCIE card 500GB- 1TB Raid 5. removable /expandable modules maybe?
or a thin version these products in a laptop or maybe something the size of a DVD player would be interesting as well. Instead of a NAS drive or a Server box, just have a Laptop on a shelf somewhere in the house.
Define "Competitive".
Wow. Could be a game changer if it lives up to it's promise and is reasonably priced.
I predict that this technology takes over. The current PCIe 2.0 x16 specification is capable of transferring 8GB/sec of data. This is many times faster than SATA2 and even the upcoming USB3. The PCI 3.0 spec will double that to 16GB/sec. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#Overview)
For data reading and writing, even 1GB/sec is ridiculous, so reaching the full 8GB/sec is incomprehensible.
My hunch is that future motherboards will have multiple PCIe slots open for RAIDed hardcards like these. Obviously the price needs to come down exponentially before this takes off, but I find the prospects very exciting.
IoFusion came up with a truly amazing innovation and I'm psyched to watch the trickle down effect make these cards affordable to average consumers like me.
I am not buying a SSD until they fix that "write over time, then you need to reformat" glitch. I do a lot of information moving. SSD would suck for me.
wow, SSDs in a mac? Why don't you just put rocket engines on your hamster?
ZDrive
$1300
510MB/sec, write speeds480MB/sec
250GB
2xPCI slots
2x Vertex Onboard RAID 0
$690
450MB/sec+, writes at 360MB/sec
240GB
Why would I use the former? I'd like to see power consumption numbers and random read/write performance before I pull the trigger. Someone call Anand.
There is a 120GB version in the UK:
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Solid+State/OCZ+120GB+Z-Drive+PCI+Express+Solid+State+Drive+?productId=35812