OCZ Announces Availability of its Z-Drive PCI-E SSD

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

There has been some doubt over the past few months (especially from competitors) as to whether or not OCZ would deliver their PCI-E "Z-Drive" solid-state disk to market, but according to a press release issued late last week, we should be able to expect immediate availability (as in, availability soon to the end consumer). At the time of this writing, I couldn't find any e-tailers to stock the product, but I'd expect places like Newegg to stock it very soon.

For those unaware, OCZ's Z-Drive is the company's answer to the S-ATA performance bottleneck. Because the drive utilizes the PCI-E bus, speeds faster than what the S-ATA bus can provide are possible. In the case of the P84 1TB drive, 870MB/s Read and 780MB/s Write speeds are possible. That kind of performance is simply a pipe dream where S-ATA drives are concerned.

Because the Z-Drive will be expensive, and understandably so, OCZ has released two versions, the E84 and P84 (I'm unsure what 84 represents). The E version uses SLC chips, so it's faster, and has a longer lifespan, but should also be considerably more expensive. The P version on the other hand sticks to the much more affordable, yet still fast, MLC chips.

Pricing as of press time haven't been made available, but I'd expect these to target only businesses and server environments. Considering each Z-Drive utilizes four standard SSDs in RAID, they're likely to be more expensive than four SSDs of a given speed if you were to buy them individually. Either way, the release of these will hopefully help boost SSDs in the marketplace. The sooner these high-end drives become common, the sooner they become a reality to the end-consumer.

With 8 PCI-E lanes and an internal four-way RAID 0 configuration, the Z-Drive delivers exceptional performance that translates to professional-class data storage in a complete, all-in-one form factor. Additionally, OCZ offers unique customization options for OEM clients that may require tailored hardware or firmware solutions for their business.

Source: OCZ Press Release
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[RobbyBob]

Is it theoretically possible to just have a S-ATA to PCI? I mean would it increase performance at all or is it limited by the hdd controllers?

 

[gibbersome]

HDD storage has dropped to $0.10/GB, the lowest its ever been.

But with the advent of SSD, this is completely mute. I think we're shifting to a point where for the average user traditional HDD will be used only as additional storage data (perhaps external mostly). SSD will become primary storage disk on your computers and laptops.

As with most technology, the prices don't drop until there's something bigger and better to supplant it and this might do the job in the case of SSDs.

So I'm guessing a Z Drive will run me around $1,000?

 

[Kougar]

Is it theoretically possible to just have a S-ATA to PCI? I mean would it increase performance at all or is it limited by the hdd controllers?

Nope, PCI is far to slow. Even the first generation SATA 1.5Gbit/s offers higher bandwidth. PCI operates at 33MHz and best case is around 133MB/s (as opposed to SATA 1/5Gbit/s falling around 150MB/s). There are things like overhead to also consider, but frankly the only thing faster than the SATA 3Gbit/s bus would be the PCI-E bus.

HDD storage has dropped to $0.10/GB, the lowest its ever been.

But with the advent of SSD, this is completely mute. I think we're shifting to a point where for the average user traditional HDD will be used only as additional storage data (perhaps external mostly). SSD will become primary storage disk on your computers and laptops.

As with most technology, the prices don't drop until there's something bigger and better to supplant it and this might do the job in the case of SSDs.

So I'm guessing a Z Drive will run me around $1,000?

If you look around a bit or monitor some deal sites (or one of Newegg's promos) you can find HDD storage as cheap as $0.06 cents per GB.

I agree with you that I believe SSDs will eventually supplant HDD's as the main OS drive, but I don't think it will begin to happen until SSD's are much closer to around $1.00 per GB. Currently the cheapest drives fall around $2.15-$2.75 per GB, far more than even a pricey Velociraptor.

 

[RobbyBob]

Nope, PCI is far to slow. Even the first generation SATA 1.5Gbit/s offers higher bandwidth. PCI operates at 33MHz and best case is around 133MB/s (as opposed to SATA 1/5Gbit/s falling around 150MB/s). There are things like overhead to also consider, but frankly the only thing faster than the SATA 3Gbit/s bus would be the PCI-E bus.

Sorry, I was really tired early this morning when I wrote that. What I meant was a PCI-e x1 bridge, but I wasn't thinking when I edited that out. Would that be theoretically possible, or are the SSDs limited in data transfer speed by their on-board drive controller?

 

[Kougar]

The drive controller is pretty much what makes the difference between a SSD being a worthless piece of junk versus it being the best drive on the market, true.

Not only is it theoretically possible, but manufacturers have done exactly that with SATA 6Gbit/s. You can read the details over here.

The problem is a PCIe 2.0 1x link is 500MB/s... SATA 6 is rated for 600MB/s, so in fact if there was an SSD that offered 600MB/s of performance, it would lose 100MB/s because the PCIe 2.0 1x link was to slow. That is why all of the SSD's fast enough to pose a problem were built onto PCIe cards that plug into PCIe 2.0 4x or 8x slots, like OCZ's Z-Drive. (PCIe 2.0 8x would offer 4,000MB/s)