Mmm,
PCI-Express-based SSD storage. Be honest, is there anything more delicious? The camera-wielding cats over at
Hot Hardware managed to climb behind the scenes at OCZ Technology and snap a bevy of shots of the outfit's highly anticipated
Z-Drive in prototype form, and while the device doesn't look all that different than the
press shots we peeked last month, there seems to be some ways yet to go before this bad boy's available for purchase. At any rate, the innards look about as you'd expect 'em to, with loads of green PCB littered about with oodles of ultra-speedy flash storage. The drive pictured above is actually a 512GB version with a single 4-pin molex power connector and an X4 PCI-e slot, and it benched at upwards of 500MB/sec during read tests and 400MB/sec on write tests. Check the read link for a closer look -- just don't forget to prep the drool rag before heading over.
posted May 18th 2009 8:56AM
You guys wanna send me one of those? ... :)
Any mention of being able to string 2 of these together in RAID?
Isn't it fast enough that you wouldn't need RAID. Also, isn't flash storage secure enough that you wouldn't necessarily need RAID for redundancy either? Not sure if I'm correct on this...just throwing it out there.
It wouldn't be the same thing as RAID because they are neither inexpensive or independent. They're not even disks. They could make them behave like a RAID and sell it as a feature, but they probably won't since the cost to benefit ratio is probably low for them.
@Jon
No, they're not fast enough, nothing is ever fast enough.
No, flash drives have a limited life span and can die just like any other electronic component.
according to a comment by the author of the article, it is already running in raid 0 internally in the device.
"This is a 512GB version (4 X128GB SSD, RAID 0)."
adding the element of another raid 0 "drive" to this already large array of 4 SSDs would increase the possibility of failure by a fair amount. not really ideal for mission critical but it would be great for a power workstation, that's for sure. i wouldn't mind if someone dropped one off on my doorstep.
I think he was joking.
re: jay.vis
No, actually, SSDs are NOT like every other kind of component. Their lack of moving parts makes them EXPONENTIALLY more dependable and reliable than traditional hard drives.
but they're relatively new wheras hard drives have been out for a long while and companies are good at making them
I'll suck the dust out of RMA'd products if you send me one of these?
P.S. I also do LCD licking for Amazon vouchers?
why the question mark?
lol, good point. My numbers up, the grammer-ton judge has got me.
In my defence,I was obviously questioning the sexual boundaries between man and machine whilst posting comment, hence the strange and unusual use of question marks. It was totally a form of Freudian parapraxis.
He's also going to charge you for spelling grammar with an e.
And saying "numbers up" instead of "number's up" and not putting the word 'the' before 'comment' and not having a space after the comma, oh and not using capitals for the acronym LOL I guess.
Put this up for Engadget's Recession Antidote!!
I doubt the guys at Hot Hardware are looking to give anything away....
What's up with the 4pin-Molex connector? I thought we moved to 15pin-SATA
I agree.. but many PSUs from about 2006/2007 still only have a couple of SATA power connectors and a plethora of 4-pin molex connectors. The 4-pin molex is simply ubiquitous.
It would have been really nice if they could have found a way around having a FAN in the SOLID STATE drive...
its only tiny and would be under a cover, doubt you would see or hear it.
Just dont drool when installing the thing or you'll be crying instead of drooling.
Seriously thats damn fast, any word on the power consumption?
Say watt?
All well and good but what about lifespan issues? performance degrades over time?
Since things thing is basically just a PCIe Raid card and 4 bay 2.5 sata drive cage I wonder if down the road when mem densities get higher and cheaper if you could just swap out the ssd sata boards in it? No need to replace the core controller, which I doubt it very cheap, to up the capacity.
I was just thinking the same thing. Hopefully, in the final product, the modular design will persist. I wonder if this is completely automatic, or if there is some sort of user interface at boot, like a RAID controller, which would allow you to manage the individual "disks". Really, there is no reason there couldn't be a modular product released to retail sans "disks" in a roll-your-own fashion. Next 6-12 months should be really interesting.
very cool idea.
Since when did SSD's or their controllers need active cooling?
Heat is the #1 enemy of electronic components, better to cool than to not cool.
Raid cards get hot, memory gets hot. Together in one dense area? Hmm...I wonder if there might be some heat issues?
Them be some fast moving electrons, no wonder they need fans... but no lemonade?
HURRAH! another tiny screaming fan, why not a heatsink please ?
Some sort of rule of law that nothing is allowed to be too nice I think and that all fixed storage must be noisy.
NO SSD Storage Wins My Respect Till After Reviewed & Tested. Particularly, Write Performance.
Theory Is ONE Thing, Actual Performance May be Much Less?
UP TILL Ocz HAS mADE many cLAIMS OF ssd EXTREME Speed & Tested Units havn't EVER Broken 1 Mb/s in TRUE Write Measurment.
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D.
This thing is awesome, but for more sane people you could make quite an awesome system with a cheap RAID 0 card and two OCZ Vertex 250GB drives... Or if you want to be really crazy, use 4x 64GB OCZ SLC drives..
(Sorry for the late post...)
Absolutely agree, this will be way overpriced for the performance it provides. It's available for pre-order here in Germany at 1400 € for 250 GB version. Er...., hello?
I'm running 4 (rather oldish by now) OCZ Core V2 in RAID 0, 30GB each for total of 120GB for the system drive, on a regular built-into motherboard RAID controller (Asus Rampage 2 Extreme) and get similar read times, more than 500 GB/s, with lower write times, around 260 GB/s, which is still faster than any hard-drive. Win 7 boots in 14 seconds. The new drives cost 126 € here, for the total price of 504 €.
I bet with Vertex series and a good Adaptec controller you can beat the Z-Drive performance hands down.
(Sorry for pricing in euros, I expect you can do the re-calc to USD yourselves.)
The real deal for the (high) price will be getting this, when it becomes available outside of Japan:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/05/photofast-g-monster-promise-pcie-ssd-does-1000mb-s-read-and-writ/
Z-Drive? Just say no, even if you have the money - do your own RAID setup.
Play a game and your raid will start sucking, not good for random data...
How about running a game server on this? My nfs underground will get faster... Oh yes