Z
When we first saw
OCZ's
Z-Drive at this year's CeBIT show, a 1TB SSD, made up of four
256GB drives in RAID0, all housed in a graphics-card like enclosure and
interfacing with the system via a PCI-Express x16 slot, we thought it
was style over substance, designed to woo the crowds and press. Who
would come to market with a drive like that?
The answer is OCZ, of course. The drives will be presented in much the
same form-factor as we saw at CeBIT, hooking up to the system via a
PCIe x4 link, to mitigate any potential bandwidth bottlenecks that may
occur via a regular SATA interface.
Internally, the drive features a 256MB cache and, obviously, on-board
RAID controller that straps the SSD together. It's cooled by a small fan on the back and the drive measures 245mm x 124mm x 22mm (WxDxH).
Drive
|
Read speed (max) |
Write speed (max) |
Sustained write speed |
Expected price |
250GB
|
450MB/s |
450MB/s |
200MB/s |
£950 |
| 500GB |
510MB/s
|
480MB/s |
200MB/s |
£1,450 |
| 1,000GB |
500MB/s |
480MB/s |
200MB/s |
£2,250 |
The blistering 700MB/s read and 500MB/s write speed of the CeBIT drive
is nowhere to be seen, intimating the use of cheaper OCZ SSDs inside.
The ouch comes in the form of price, reckoned to be just shy of a grand
for the 250GB model and rising, inexorably, to £2,250 for the
1TB
monster.
Other multi-SSD-drive options may be cheaper, but we don't
think it really matters what price the Z-Drive comes in at, frankly,
because its job is to raise awareness of the brand as a halo product,
and it does that pretty well. Who is going to buy one then?
Manufacturer's
link
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HEXUS.community :: your right2reply
Can you even boot from PCIe?
Of course you can. Just like you can boot from PCI.
How do you think RAID cards work? And this is a RAID card with 4 drives attached already anyway.Quote
"1TB SSD, made up of four 256GB drives in RAID0"
that works?
they are using 4 smaller drives in stripping config to make 1 big one, surely thats JBOD set up?
i smell something fishy hereQuote
someone explain how
"1TB SSD, made up of four 256GB drives in RAID0"
that works?
RAID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#Standard_levels)Quote
http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-ZDrive-Sneak-Peek-SSD-RAID-PCIe-Card/
:)
Granted it's a pre-production version, but it gives you an idea of what it's like.Quote
Reply