While Fusion-io's PCI-Express SSDs garner
glowing reviews and
deplete wallets accordingly, OCZ hasn't been so lucky -- even as its similar Z-Drive boasted seriously speedy sequential transfer speeds that made it desirable for video editing and the like, it was
tested and found wanting in consumer applications. This time, OCZ is playing to its strengths and marketing its next batch of Z-Drives directly to the professional market. Boasting banks filled with hot-swappable NAND modules, OCZ claims the Z-Drive R2 can be serviced and upgraded in the field -- and with two full tiers of flash memory woven together in a 2TB, eight-way RAID 0 configuration on their premium Z-Drive p88 model, the company claims you'll see 1.4GB/s (yes, that's
gigabytes per second) read and write speeds. No word on pricing and availability, but you can safely assume that the power to instantaneously teleport your entire Doctor Who wallpaper collecti-- we mean, edit raw 1080p footage in real time -- won't come cheap.
posted April 7th 2010 6:21AM
Mmmmm... They could at least make it look a little more sexy.
@n0ne
It's going to be unseen inside your case, WHO CARES!?
@n0ne Just thought of this, and correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a normal HHD with USB 3.0 be better and faster than this? Not to mention WAY cheaper.
@n0ne I'll happily correct you - you're wrong.
@n0ne This thing is so fast it'd bottleneck both USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps. Only the power of multiple PCI-E lanes is enough to feed it.
@n0ne
The limit isn't on the transfer speed of the cable, it's the read/write speeds of the HDDs that are the slowest factor.
@(Unverified) some (very rough numbers). I had thought it was such a ridiculous suggestion that these wouldn't be needed but I can forsee an uninformed response coming up(!)
This SSD ~1,400MB/s
USB 3.0 Theoretical Max ~570MB/s
A decent mechanical hard disk ~150MB/s
@(Unverified) Alright, fine what about 3.0 to SSD's? I mean this thing goes 1.4GB/s. USB 3.0 does 5.0GB/s, and again, much cheaper.
@(Unverified) That's not what makes SSD's so fast (Even though it's true), it's the Random access speeds which destroy hard drives.
@n0ne no it would be alot slower
@n0ne come on... this is getting tedious.
USB 3 = 5Gb/s NOT 5GB/s
@Karnak thats right... the Bits Bytes thing... lol miss read i guess.
@n0ne Dude, are you completely out of your mind or has the cult of Steve J. shadowed your half bitten-off brain?
WHY THE F* SHOULD THIS LOOK SEXIER? It's not a Mac, it's a serious piece of hardware and quite honestly, it's the specs that give me a boner, not the looks. You superficial *****...
@n0ne
Its not the interface thats the bottleneck, its the storage medium. It wouldn't matter if you connected a hard drive to a 100,000GB/s interface, it would still only transfer at 50-70MB/s.
@Karnak
A "decent" mechanical drive reads at only 50-70MB/s, which ones were you looking at? Even the new Velociraptor peaks at 140.
@loocas
LOL i agree 100%
@Nitesh
The new 600GB raptor will do >150MB/s read in some tests.
@Nitesh Samsung F3 500GB or 1TB does 140MB/s
@Prevacator Mac users that's who.
I'll take four please.
What the hell was that? They've gone to plaid!
@Ducman69 Close all shops in the mall. Cancel the three ring circus. Secure all animals in the zoo. :)
Glad I'm not the only one who saw the title and thought of this.
@Ducman69 Ridiculous Speed just wasn't enough....
@Ducman69
"They must have hyperjets on that thing."
"And what do we got on this thing? A Cuisinart?"
@xkaosu9x no, Mr. Coffee
(and Mr. Radar too of course)
No words.... should have sent a poet...
what is this thing? RAM or a storage drive?
@cray flash based storage drive. in other words, an SSD where you can swap the chips if you want (most likely you buy it with one flash module at the beginning, and then let it grow as needed)
@cray Storage?
@Chris DPSN AggieCEO XBLThe Aggi Yes, as in harddrive or in this case solid state drive which are defined as 'storage'.
Dear OCZ,
Can you please direct me as to which bank I would have to pilfer in order to aquire your overpriced, I mean extremely amazing Solid State Memory Solution.
Disclaimer: This is a joke and is in no way intended to be taken as a serious call to arms to rob any bank in any shape or form or to rob OCZ HQ or anyone/anything for that matter, pay for your stuff and if you cant, look for more affordable stuff you can buy. Oh and dont buy crap thats too expensive either (HINT), because you just wont have any money left to buy anything else. Not even a computer to be able to put your components into.
Awww.. You tried so hard! Brings a tear to the eye, really. Off ya go.
It wants powerrrrrrrrrrrr, it needs powerrrrrrrrrrrrr
AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
More embarrassing. God how is that possible..
Sure you're allowed to be on mommy's computer?
They are for sale!
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=OCZ's+Z-Drive&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=7476392416877555888&ei=S2W8S7DAN8GqlAfp7JWzDg&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBUQ8wIwAg#ps-sellers
969$
@Sonicjet your looking at the Z-Drive m84 model. The top one here is the Z-Drive m88.
@Sonicjet well thats cheaper than i thought they where going to be
@Sonicjet http://www.google.com/products?q=ocz%20z-drive%20p88&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf
I wonder how long until these become affordable? I can wait 2-3 years, 5 would be unpleasant but doable.
@juanvaldez just under 2.5k, 4.5k, 9k for 512GB, 1TB, 2TB respectively.
11 slot PCI-E x4 backplane - $2000+
11 of these badboys - $99,000
Watching a Full 32 PCI-E lanes gag like a porn star - PRICELESS.
Kudos for great capacity, shame about the usefulness. There is no battery for the on-board cache, so you get either lousy performance (unless *all* your writes are 128 KiB chunks) or corrupt data on power failure. Also, the throughput for a real world mix of varying write sizes and reads remains to be seen. It won't be anywhere near the stated 550 MiB/s and 7200 IOPS, that's for sure. This is where Intel's firmware shines.
MOAR POWAH TO THE ARTISTS!
Dear Santa,...
I'll throw some of these in my Cray XT Jaguar later.
@Prevacator
antec skeleton case perhaps?>
Holy shit! I just drooled but too bad I don't need one!
Frankly I'm disappointed it's only 2TB in size. I have a whole 1TB RAID 0 array filled with videos and MP3s and I need more space. As tempting as this is I'd be better off with a NAS setup. Although the pure geek factor might just win. Does it work with Linux?
"Boasting banks filled with hot-swappable NAND modules"
the OCZ release doesn't mention anything about hot-swap. i'm thinking you just meant swappable.
So if you RAID five of these things....*pops* Oh crap. The universe just caved in on itself from the sheer awesomeness that occurred.
"I see your banks of swappable NAND modules are as big as mine."