OCZ announces PCIe flash drive

Solid state drive boasts speeds up to 800MB/s

By Lucas Mearian | Computerworld US
Published: 10:33 GMT, 18 September 09

OCZ Technology Group today unveiled the Z-Drive, a PCI-Express (PCIe) solid-state disk (SSD) drive designed for enterprise-class data centers that boasts throughput speeds of up to 800MB/s.

OCZ said the Z-Drive is bootable and takes the serial-ATA (SATA) bottleneck out of the I/O equation by employing a high-speed PCIe architecture coupled with a compact enterprise-grade RAID array. The drive has 8 PCIe lanes and an internal four-way RAID 0 configuration to increase performance.

The PCEe interface is currently rated at 500 MB/s per lane (8Gbit/sec with 8 lanes). PCIe 3.0, to be released in 2010, will have a throughput rate of 1GB/s per lane. SATA's maximum throughput is currently at 3Gbit/sec., although it is moving to 6Gbit/s.

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OCZ offers customisation options for OEM clients that want tailored hardware or firmware options for their business.

"The Z-Drive is designed not only to be higher performing and more reliable than conventional solutions, but also to significantly reduce both the maintenance and overall TCO for our clients," Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ, said in a statement.

The Z-Drive is available in multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and single-level cell (SLC) models referred to consecutively as p84 and e84. According to OCZ, the p84 Z-Drive has a maximum sequential read rate of 750MB/sec and a maximum write rate of 650MB/sec and, using a 4KB file size, a maximum of 10,000 input/output per seconds rate. The e84 Z-Drive has a maximum sequential read rate of 800MB/sec and a maximum write rate of 750MB/sec. The e84 Z-Drive can achieve up to 16,000 input/output operations per seconds.

The Z-Drive is available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB (p84 only) capacities. The Z-Drive comes with a three-year warranty with technical support.

OCZ did not offer pricing for the drive, which is normally dictated by its resellers.

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