OCZ's Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD gets exhaustively reviewed

Man, talk about a letdown. It's hard to put into mere words just how excited we were about the OCZ Z-Drive when we saw an early prototype shell way back at CeBIT, and now that it's shipping out to affluent users, we've got a remarkably thorough review explaining that it's probably not the dream device we were all hoping for. The good folks over at Hot Hardware managed to slam the Z-Drive m84 into their PCIe slot and run it through a battery of tests, and aside from larger file transfers, there just wasn't a mind-blowing amount of awesomeness to speak of. Critics expected this thing to rival at least an SSD RAID solution driven by a software RAID controller, but for whatever reason, that simply wasn't the case. Hit the read link for more benchmarks than you'd ever care to see on a weekend, and feel free to pocket that plastic.

[rs4 Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:17PM]

What's a ZJ?

[Yarnage Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:21PM]

You mom.

[krische Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:15PM]

if you have to ask; you can't afford it

[lbwmoo Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:22PM]

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

[Dummy00001 Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:29PM]

Do they already quote any reasonable durability numbers? How the drives compare to conventional HDDs over prolonged period of time?

Or it's still the same old MTBF B.S.?

[DougieBear Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:28PM]

I imagine the will have the same number of read/write cycles as previous flash memory but It will probably fair better when you drop your desktop computer.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:33PM]

Weekend? It's Monday here...

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:56PM]

haha yea really.


Sounds like somebody has the case of the "Mondays"...

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 7:51PM]

Really? Shit, i need to go to work! Damn.

[LondonConsultant Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:10PM]

mSATA?...

[rduran Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:21PM]

What a letdown... :-(

This thing has an actual RAID controller w/ cache and it's barely as fast as a single SSD. It should be one of the fastest (if not *the* fastest.)

[fzzzt Posted Oct 19th 2009 10:02PM]

Um, just adding a RAID controller with or without cache won't make something perform faster. Usually, putting disks into a RAID makes them perform slower, in fact. RAID 0 can often perform faster than a single drive, and RAID 1 can for reads if the controller is good, but most RAID types perform slower than a single drive. RAID was created (and is mainly used) for redundancy, not performance; I wouldn't expect it to work faster than a single drive. You're adding complexity and another process to go through, even with one SSD. What I would expect, however, is this to perform faster than a single spindle drive (at least for random I/O).

Of course, if I cared about any of this crap, I would get a RAM drive and not even bother with this crap.

[loocas Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:38PM]

What the hell?! Did you actually read the article before stating an opinion? It's actually NOT A LET DOWN! In fact, in most tests, the Z-Drive (even the "mainstream" version) topped a 4x Intel SSD in RAID0 on writes and totally on reads. The only problem was file sizes smaller than about 256K, which, mind you, is really not such a LET DOWN as you try to make out of it!

[rduran Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:06PM]

So it's fast for large reading/writing large files. Unless I'm manipulating large files like video or iso images then I won't really see a speed benefit over a single SSD. To me, that makes it a let down for general use.

[loocas Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:17PM]

Well, that probably really depends on a user's perspective. For me, this makes perfect sense and I'd benefit from the card. For you, this might not mean any benefits and you wouldn't benefit from the card. I need a card that can, specifically, read very, very fast and I think I found it in the Fusion-io's IO-Drive. It's pricey, but I think I can live with that as speed is my No. 1 concern for the type of work I need the card to perform (read tons of large files as fast as possible! Hopefully at least at 25Hz).

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 20th 2009 8:26AM]

but my 500mb photoshop document will open in 2 seconds, and my 7gb of RAM allocated will cache to my swap drives that much quicker and perhaps even get data from my GPU a bit quicker? (photoshop gpu acceleration rocks)

In for 2.

[Saber Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:39PM]

I stopped reading when I saw that it isn't Mac compatible.
Regards,

[loocas Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:59PM]

Wow! What a show stopper!






*rolls eyes*

[chansthename Posted Oct 20th 2009 12:48AM]

I stopped caring about blu-ray when apple said I didn't need it. /sarcasm

[jol Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:10PM]

I always feel good reading these because it gives me something to look forward to in ten years, when I can afford it.

[exenter Posted Oct 30th 2009 1:54PM]

Really bad IOPS performance.

[Please forgive me Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:33PM]

The price isn't bad. $900 / 256GB and it gets cheaper the more disk space you buy. I spent $2000 on a raid card and 5 SCSI drives about 4 years ago... mind you that setup is still very fast... this looks good.

I love LSI controllers.

[albundy Posted Oct 19th 2009 10:59PM]

bad optimizations? could also be the motherboard too.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 20th 2009 3:54AM]

Im glad it was a let down! Would of been upset if my 5 SSD in RAID 0 would of been blown away by this. Ill keep my raid 0 array and the huge improvement they give me in Win7 Ultimate and in general loading times of all things!