Le sigh. When OCZ's
hotly-anticipated Z-Drive popped up
for pre-order on Amazon back in May, we just
knew that this thing would be shipping out to consumers in no time flat. Yet, here we are in early September with an estimated ship date of "1 to 3 months." Thankfully for those anxiously awaiting a serious dose of PCI-Express-based
SSD goodness, it looks as if the firm has finally nailed down the final look, feel and performance numbers for the device. There's no arguing that the unit you see above is all the excuse you need to invest in a translucent chassis, but it's the promised sustained write rates of up to 600MB/sec that really have us drooling. So far as we know, the outfit will still be charging somewhere in the neighborhood of four arms and 2.5 legs for the privilege of ownership, but if that 1TB edition just feels too far out of reach, hopefully the 250GB and 500GB models will only require a smattering of heists.
posted Sep 3rd 2009 9:48AM
Cant wait for the speeds! its going to be a big jump in the computer world. The hard drive is the slowest part of your system and everything goes through it!
People keep complaining about the price of SSds but that single investement makes such an impact on your daily usage. Your computer feels 2x as fast with a good SSD.
@Erik, you're absolutely right. For designers that work with Adobe's Creative Suite its the best investment he can make to save time.
"a serious does of PCI-Express-based SSD goodness"
or possibly a "dose"
Is that a does in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
@Dr Robotnik
Its just a does.
@Erik
Indeed it does. You wouldn't believe what a difference a good SSD can make to a laptop whose slowest and weakest component is a 4200rpm hard drive. It's like I have a whole new computer now.
I switched from a 5400rpm 80GB Hitachi to a 7200rpm 500GB Seagate. Only cost about $130 and it certainly made a night and day difference without spending a shit ton of coin on a SSD. The drive will take a 350G operating shock and the laptop is equipped with an active protection gyroscope system to protect the drive further. Spinning platters still make a lot of sense compared to SSDs for the vast majority of computer users.
How about making this a Recession antidote Engadget?
OK... color me stupid! After I plug in this super fast hard drive into my PCIe slot, where do I plug in my PCI video card?
alot of motherboards come with 2 PCIex slots, and newer ones are coming with 3. you should have no problems installing this card and your gpu, unless you're doing Crossfire/SLi with a board that only has two PCIex slots. then maybe you'll have a problem.
if you can afford this SSD, im sure you can easily afford to buy a new motherboard with two slots :)
http://www.evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=170-BL-E762-A1
How about 7 full PCI-E, with no other slots in sight.
(If link doesnt work, it's eVga's X58 Classified 4-Way SLI Motherboard)
hahahaha, from link
Expansion Slot
7 x PCIe x16/x8
0 x 32-bit PCI, support for PCI
I love this board.
@deccangroove
wow, just looked at their price on amazon. certainly correct on that. this thing would end up costing as much as your whole computer, let alone just the mobo.
How fresh do the 4 arms and 2.5 legs have to be? I got a shove and some spare time if somebody wants to make a deal.
I also have a shovel and a spell check fail.
After having 4 of the Vertex's fail horribly on me, I'm eying this puppy with a healthy grain of salt.
I really need one of these. I've got a BlackMagic Intensity that requires at least 200 MB/s write speed to smoothly record 1080p video, and RAID is too unreliable. This is far simpler. Hopefully it's not the 4 arms and 2.5 legs Engadget suspects it will cost. Maybe something closer to 1.5 arms and 1 leg would work better.
You're dreaming.
You're lying. I also own the BlackMagic Design Intensity and it can only record 1080i/60 or 720p/60, not 1080p.
You also only need around 105MBps write speed for uncompressed HD video. It is A LOT less if you record using the compressed codec options.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=30
If RAID is too unreliable then you don't know what you are doing. Get a velociraptor and stop whining.
Wait, what!? "RAID is too unreliable?!" I suspect you're doing it wrong.
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 60i = 237 MB per/sec, or 834 GB per/hr.
Wonder how much this will cost... $1200?
$1500 for the 250GB one that's on Amazon. No thanks, you can get a really nice PC for that price.
Okay, $1500? No thanks. I know that this is wicked fast, and I have a couple rubbermaid tubs full of scsi controllers from just about every vendor, a bunch of 10krpm cheetahs that I paid $700 each for, etc etc. I am tired of being the early adopter that gets bent over and raped. I paid $15 per CD-R back in the 1x days! Oh well.
Same story for the SSD's, they are coming down in price to where I am about to bite but $1500? or $7000 for the enterprise class PCIe SSD?
I will wait for intel to start shipping the X25-M Gen2 again, and put two 80G drives in a raid0 stripe and boot my O/S off that. No slots required, uses two sata channels on the ICH10R, no raid controller to buy, $500 total cost. With the extra $1000, I could easily add a SATA raid controller and 4TB in a RAID 5 configuration. Just run a snapshot of the SSD stripe set over to the RAID5 every so often.
Viola! My own HSM solution.
Question: Why would this SSD be PCIe based and not SATA based??? Can someone please explain that to me?
SATAII is limited to 300mb and this card clearly is quite a bit faster.
Ohhhhhhh, duh!!! I went back and looked at the specs and that def makes sense.
Thanks Dick
The real question is, with SATA3 at 600MB/s right around the corner, what's the point? If you notice, SSD's read speeds are right at the limit of SATA2 today (over 270MB/s from the upper-echelon of MLC drives). Either the write speed needs to be insane or IOPS need to be off the charts. I'm willing to bet if you wait for SATA3 you can get 75%+ of the performance for a fraction of the cost.
Oh and don't compare this to ioFusion, no comparison at all. This uses NAND flash vs ioFusions RAM based storage.
And apparently 600MB/s is very conservative, looks more like >700MB/s _AVERAGE_ read speeds.
http://it-review.net/article/hardware/hdd/OCZ_Z_drive_review
What's the driver difference between a SSD and a HDD?
Does the OS have to have a different kind of architecture to get full speed out of SSD's?
And could someone tell me how i can calculate bottlenecks? Or some online-calculator?
And yes i'm gonna say it. I would like to see Crysis running with that equiped.
Why does everyone think these guys are the only ones on the block doing this? FusionIO's look just as nice, and as far as I can tell, they've been shipping for a while now. Why all this fascination with a company that can't even ship a product?
http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/