OCZ's Z-Drive priced at Amazon: $1,561 and way up
By Darren Murph 
posted May 19th 2009 9:34AM
posted May 19th 2009 9:34AM
[Thanks, Gary]
Read - 250GB Z-Drive listing
Read - 500GB Z-Drive listing
Read - 1TB Z-Drive listing
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Wow, $10 off Amazon? With free shipping no less! How can they afford to stay in business?!
Holy crap, that's some fast data access. But I'm in the *damn* category too over the price.
Could someone explain to me the need for fast access to 1TB of data? I can see the appeal of having the your OS on an SSD along with a few choice programs (for fast boot/load times), but that wouldn't take up 1TB...
I can see where big business would have a need to access data as fast as possible. I could use it myself. I'm a graphic designer and work with large files quite a bit. Saving a 2 gig photoshop file in 4 seconds would be pretty sweet. Not $3000 worth of sweet, but pretty sweet.
Don't forget financial institutions (as broke as some may be). A couple of my friends work for ML and you are a hero if you can improve processing speeds of large datasets by milliseconds.
I see your point JStro, but I would have thought the speed of large (and presumably distributed) databases is limited more by the network than by the speed of individual drives within. I'm well out of my area of expertise though.
It is not too expensive if you consider it has an expected life (MTBF=mean time between failures) of 900,000 hours that's dog years (105+ years actually) compared to HDD drives. I bought one for our email server to reduce seeking drive head failures that occur on many email servers from all the jumping around. Email is OMG fast on our Gigabit internal network. Adding one next month to each of our 6 internal application servers.
IT with a budget equals... Let the praise begin.
I'm kinda curious as to why they're focusing so much of speed with SSD technology before price. They'd earn much more money if they could put out a good speed SSD drive for < $2 a GB it would sell like crazy. I'm guessing that these don't exactly fly off the shelves...
Meh people act like they never heard of RAID before...
"...SSDs act like they don't know
This is what you waited all year for
The Z-drive, that's what OCZ is here for..."
And so on.
Of course in 1991 I (or at least my dad) paid about 1000 US for a 66MB harddrive on a card for my 7.14 mhz Amiga with 3 MB of ram. Ah...those were the days.
Sorry...my GPS just guided me back to Memory lane.
Thats a bad deal?
Oh shit, ive been done, again :(
I love the idea and hate the prices. Damn shame.
At least its free shipping !
@Timoh
Yeah, your supercar thing doesn't hold up too well either. You may have your 2001 Ferrari Speghetti appreciate $10k from list price in 8 years, but it will be the exception. Most luxury and sports cars fall to about 50% of original list after a short time.
So what if it is expensive...
Hey Engadeget, Try going to your local Ferrari or Aston Martin dealer and telling them that the price for the new super sports car is over priced and see if they decide to lower the price or pull out a shotgun and tell you to GTFO!
If you cant pay the $$$ for it you have other options.. Go buy a regular HD, or string a couple of High speed SDHC together. And then use the savings to pay for a little compact GM car...
Too bad this thing did not have an Apple logo on it...
EXPENSIVE GADGETS FTW!!!!!
This is quite a bit different than an expensive car. That argument doesn't add up at all. These prices are pretty ridiculous for a piece of computer hardware, especially when in a year it wont even cost half the price. A supercar will retain value. If you bought a $250,000 Ferrari and a year later it was only worth $80,000 not many people would buy them.
You can't buy a cheap GM car, and nobody wants to anyway lol. Cheap Japanese car, yes.GM is in trouble because they produce overpriced crap cars. You can thank the UAW and the poor designers for that one alone.
Your comment about the apple logo is spot on though, These guys would be praising it as a value, and the best thing every created if it had one.
Maths time.
Sandisk 4GB EXTREME III SDHC SD Card $30
1000/4 = 250
250*$30 = $7500
Thats without all the hardware (RAID card, SD to S-ATA adapters) that you would need for this to be a coherent drive.
You were saying?
@Nailbunny
Sports and luxury cars don't mean its a super car.
Most super car owners keep their cars for about a year, and im not sure what you're checking, but the resale of a ferrari, aston martin, etc, don't depreciate as much as you are leading on here. Mercedes, maybe but unless you're talking about the Mclaren SLR or the CLK Black, they don't sell supercars.
I love Amazon's note "you save $10" ....
*SMACK* that was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor! I hope in about 2 or 3 years the 1TB version will be about $50, at we can hope.
Well a 1Tb 3.5" HDD is £60ish for a cheap one.
You cant yet get anthing over 500Gb 2.5" drive wise.
So in short.
No.
test
I can see you failed your test. Now you must repeat the second grade.
Really, when you compare that to an array of SCSI drives, the cost/performance benefits aren't hard to realise. Not to mention heat, power, space...
It's really only capacity that lags behind. Enthusiasts would be a little mad to stump up that much money, however.
Well at least we've seen some downward movement on price. I'm sure I'll be able to talk myself into to buying this thing somehow.
This is dumb. Saturate SATA2 deterministically and then we'll talk.
It's a new technology and for now just a toy. No reason to have anything other than maybe your OS load on it unless you're running a server.
I like the "Ususally ships in 1 to 3 months" as if they've shipped these things out before.
I think the sad part is that even with that kind of money, you'd be hard pressed to raid together enough SATA ssd's (with the proper hardware) to get that transfer speed.
I dont get it, why pay this much when you can build the same thing for far less?
raid card + 6 or 8 vertex ssd's....faster, cheaper.
why are you all fawning over this?
Not really much cheaper at all.
To hit the 250GB size, you'd need 9 of the 30GB SSDs, which (for the Vertex drives you mentioned) go for $200 a piece on newegg. Total cost? $1800 without the RAID controller. Quite a bit more than the Z-Drive.
If you use 60GB SSDs you'd need 5 of them, which at $225 a piece puts you right around $1100. With the RAID controller, you'll end up saving a couple hundred bucks, but performance probably won't match the Z-Drive.
When you start talking about the 500GB and 1TB sizes, the Z-drive wins hands down.
The fact is that the price-capacity-performance ratio on these things isn't really bad. What I wish they'd do is come down in capacity and offer a cheaper model. I'd be giving this a lot more thought at $500 for 60-80GB.
actually the 60GB Vertex is $219 (199 after rebate)
so 5 x 219 is 1100 + RAID Controller. Not much savings but it is there, plus this would probably blow the doors off this Z-drive (not to mention 50GB more space).
What you forgot to mention is how much faster your "home built" version of this would be. Newegg shows the 30GB vertex drive with read speeds 220MB/s, and I've seen a couple news reviews showing SSD with near linear scaling as far as speed goes in RAID 0. I think OCZ is selling use the cheap drives in this thing and then making up the price point on it. IOdrive gets 500MB/s read from just 1 PCI express SSD and this thing uses 4 drives.
Yeah I wondered the same thing. I mean the 30GB Vertex were going for 99$ after rebate on Newegg for awhile there until they sold out before 24 hrs. I was tempted to buy some but I'm waiting for the 60GB's to drop to about that price before I commit.
250GB / 30GB drive = ~8 drives.
250GB / 60GB drive = ~4 drives.
$99 each x 8 drives = $792. In order to utilize decent speeds you need a high end custom raid system ($500+) in raid-0 as a motherboard raid system can't handle those speeds. The only data I've found online with 4 or 5 of these 30GB Vertex drives ranges from 1,000MB/sec - 1,500MB/sec but it all depends on the raid type, file transfer size, and the type of transfers your doing (sequential, random, etc) The SSD solution wins out in my opinion because you get faster speeds for about the same price. The down side is you have 4 points of failure instead of one if you were using raid 0. You could opt in for raid-5 for almost the same speeds as what this OCZ PCI card provides. The positive to this is you know if one of the SSD fails your data won't be lost.
I'm all for PCI solutions for speed but they are to damn pricey. Even more so then their SSD counterparts because there isn't much competition yet.
Usually ships within 1 to 3 months.
preorder now and watch the price drop in a couple months.
This is great an all but I think I will just wait a year until it costs like $300.
See.. all I want is like a 32GB SSD. Just enough to put XP or Vista or Win7 on. Make the OS and a few core apps snappy and then I'll deal with files and docs saving at "regular" speed. The under 30 second boots would be nice too.
But SSDs are horrible for OS applications. OS make tons of small writes (like log files). The way the SSD works is that it won't erase over the end of the file, but instead writes in some other location. Once you start overwriting your old files performance drops.
Check Anandtech's write up for technical stuff, but basically once you fill up a SSD it slows down.
Put your applications on the SSD but not your OS. Leave that to a Velociraptor or something.
Or just use a RAM disk for your programs.
My offer still stands Engadget. Call Me ;)
The idea makes sense for stuff like video and audio recording/editing, but the capacities don't make much sense given the prices. Even for high quality multi-track audio, you wouldn't need more than 60-80 gigs. I'll wait until these sort of drives are sensibly priced.
Whoever buys these should be introduced to a different Tax category (super elite) next year! Seriously, speeds are GREAT but the price WoW!? Do anyone see them coming down anytime soon (next 2 years at the least)? Be happy with SSDs guys, they will be super affordable soon... :)
0.3% Savings - TODAY ONLY!
Hmm....wonder if they'd take my jeep on trade for one. Actually its not even worth that much. NM.
At that price, they better be offering these drives with SLC flash cells, so they'll last at least a few years!
As much i'd love one, that price is insane and as im at college see myself sticking with regular old hard drives for a while longer lol
Take G-Monster, from photo fast MUCH FASTER AND CHEAPER!!!
Absolutely agree, I'm waiting for PhotoFast G-Monster-Promise to become available outside of Japan.
Double the speed of Z-Drive for the same price, and 128GB is quite enough for OS & apps. Pair of Veloci-Raptors take care of the rest of my data.
Look at : http://www.frozencpu.com for a price of $ 2080 for the 500GB. still expensive but a lot better than Amazon
As a animation compositor, this would be awesome for my productions: the single biggest bottleneck in my pipeline is the HD/digicinema capture and transfer of image frames & movies: 500 MB/s would be truly beneficial... I guess my rates are going up again. Now to add that 10GBe to my server and workstation.
If you want 500MB/s, just build a raid array- screw a card like this - buy (8) 1TB drives, and a decent RAID card, configed for RAID 0 and let'er rip. Sure, you won't have superfast random IO, but for moving around huge uncompressed video it'll scream! and you'll save money! and you'll have far more capacity.
plz tell me no one is buying these.
From Amazon -- Read: Up to 500 MB/s-Write: Up to 470MB/s -Sustained Write: Up to 200MB/s
Sustained write is pretty awful, and not mentioned in the Engadget blurb.
so this would enable full uncompressed HD/2k playback;
a boon for the effects industry.
At those prices, I'd rather get the ioDrive which can get better read rates AND meant for server/workstation use.
Also available on Dell's site: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A2595165&cs=04&c=us&l=en&dgc=SS&cid=27722&lid=628335
OCZ and others have excellent SSD drives and you can make your own version of the above with a cheap PCIexpress RAID card and a couple SSDs. Heres my recommendations based on the latest benchmarked performance per GB per dollar:
Fast 240GB in RAID 0
2x OCZ Vertex 120GB MLC (64MB cache): $755 ($377.45 each)
HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCIe controller card RAID0: $118.99
= $874 total
OR
Fast 512GB in RAID 0
2x Corsair P256 256GB MLC (128MB cache) $1398 ($699 each)
HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCIe controller card RAID0: $118.99
= $1517 total
*note: NOT all SSDs are made alike! even different models from the same manufacturer can have huge differences in performance. Always check benchmarks before buying from places like Anandtech, PCperspective, before buying. MLC drives can be slow on random writes, and so it is very important that they have at least some amount of DRAM cache.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227395 (Vertex drives)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233085 (Corsair P256)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029 (RAID card)
"for each in order of mention."
Hey Murph, "respectively" would have also worked.
Where do they find these writers? I have seen first year ESL students with a better mastery of the language.
I have to say this is awesome, but totally unnecessary for nearly all people.
lol....Usually ships within 1 to 3 months. Sweet!!!
You could also speed up your system by moving your Vram to a HyperDrive.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/