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OCZ's New Z-Drive Can Transfer Files at 1.4GB/s

OCZ's fourth generation PCI-E SSD, the Z-Drive R2, ramps up transfer speeds to a mind boggling 1.4GB/s.

By Paul Lilly  |  April 7, 2010

OCZ is going to start mass producing their PCI Express-based Z-Drive R2 SSD, and as you might imagine, that PCI-E interface pays huge dividends in lifting the bandwidth bottleneck imposed by SATA. Where today's higher performance consumer SSDs blaze a trail with read and write speeds over 200MB/s, none of them come close to keeping pace with the 1.4GB/s transfer rates the Z-Drive R2 affords. Even sustained writes check in at a mind boggling 950MB/s.
 
Naturally this kind of performance is intended for the enterprise market, but there's nothing stopping you from dropping one of these in your home machine and pairing it with an Intel Core i7 980X processor, provided your wallet can take the hit. These are bootable, after all, which is not something you can say about all PCI Express-based SSDs. In a unique twist, the Z-Drive R2 series is also user upgradeable by way of interchangeable modules rather than permanently affixed, surface mounted NAND chips. In other words, once the price of SSDs finally plummets to pedestrian levels, you can upgrade your Z-Drive without explaining to the wife, yet again, where this month's mortgage payment went. Everybody wins. 
 
Rounding out the feature-set is 512MB of local cache, an onboard RAID controller with support for an eight-way RAID 0 config, background Garbage Collection, and 8xSATA controllers. OCZ says capacities range from 256GB to 2TB but neglected to mention a price, which might not be a bad thing.
If you had to choose between a Z-Drive R2, Core i7 980X, or HD 5970, which would you pick? Are we at a point yet where we need to look beyond SATA and consider PCI-E for storage duties?
11 Comments
litrockon April 7, 2010 at 11:59 a.m.
As someone who's been continually talking himself down from paying ridiculous amounts for a SSD for a Steam drive, I'd be interested in this if it was anywhere near a rational price. I'm sure it's not. Until then, old fashion HDDs will have to do.
goodwoodon April 7, 2010 at 12:35 p.m.
out of those 3 i would rather have the core i7 980x since I rip a lot of DVDs. I dont see the need to have a hard drive that is that fast.
Zaphon April 7, 2010 at 12:59 p.m.
@litrock said:
" As someone who's been continually talking himself down from paying ridiculous amounts for a SSD for a Steam drive, I'd be interested in this if it was anywhere near a rational price. I'm sure it's not. Until then, old fashion HDDs will have to do. "
I'm not going to argue that SSD's are cheap, but believe me when I say there is not one other single upgrade you can make that will give you the performance boost of a SSD.
 
Many people who complain about the price of SSD's (I'm not saying you're one of them) are often fully prepared to spend hundreds on a graphics card that will give them a slight incremental FPS improvement over the last one, because lets face it, there isn't exactly a wealth of games out there that push our PC's to the limit.
 
Essentially, for the price of that new shiny graphics card you're looking at, you'll get a noticeable (and sometimes staggering) improvement in your OS, applications and games. I'm not saying everyone should rush out and buy the most expensive SSD they can find, but in my personal experience, no single upgrade has ever impressed me as much installing an SSD.
litrockon April 7, 2010 at 1:09 p.m.
@Zaph: Yeah, I'm sure I'll fold before the year's out, I'm just ... I'd like a little more capacity and/or a bit cheaper price.  It'll get there, and I'm not sure I feel the need to be out on the expensive edge of adoption.  We'll see. 
raikoh05on April 7, 2010 at 1:12 p.m.
  out of those 3 i would rather have the ssd since it will go for more money
SirOptimusPrimeon April 7, 2010 at 1:56 p.m.

Seeing as I barely had enough part-time work in the last couple of weeks to scrape together enough cash for a reasonable processor and gfx card, I would never get near this thing (at the moment that is). 
 
That aside, only the 980 looks useful to me. The 5970 is only clocked .5GB over my current card, and the Z-Drive is bananas, but even then the 980 is only .1GHz faster than my current proc. and overclocks only half or so of a GHz more. Though, I bet there could be boundless(ish) possibilities with how the cores are wired and with the dozen threads.

Binman88on April 7, 2010 at 2:11 p.m.
I'd take the Z-Drive. Taking the hard drives away from the intake fans in the front bays of my PC would be nice. How are the drives comparable to standard disc drives on power consumption? I'm uninformedly assuming they consume less power? If so that's another plus in their favour for me.
Skytylzon April 7, 2010 at 2:32 p.m.
Definately the i7,  but this technology is getting interesting.
captain_claymanon April 7, 2010 at 4:55 p.m.
@Zaph said:
" @litrock said:
" As someone who's been continually talking himself down from paying ridiculous amounts for a SSD for a Steam drive, I'd be interested in this if it was anywhere near a rational price. I'm sure it's not. Until then, old fashion HDDs will have to do. "
I'm not going to argue that SSD's are cheap, but believe me when I say there is not one other single upgrade you can make that will give you the performance boost of a SSD.  Many people who complain about the price of SSD's (I'm not saying you're one of them) are often fully prepared to spend hundreds on a graphics card that will give them a slight incremental FPS improvement over the last one, because lets face it, there isn't exactly a wealth of games out there that push our PC's to the limit.  Essentially, for the price of that new shiny graphics card you're looking at, you'll get a noticeable (and sometimes staggering) improvement in your OS, applications and games. I'm not saying everyone should rush out and buy the most expensive SSD they can find, but in my personal experience, no single upgrade has ever impressed me as much installing an SSD. "
true that.  after i finish my build that'll be the first upgrade i'll get an SSD for my OS and when i have a lot more money or when they get cheaper i'll get a storage one
Newtenon April 7, 2010 at 6:34 p.m.
I'd pick the i7, but I would happily take any of them. Man, that is a fast drive, holy crap.
munnyman5on April 7, 2010 at 9:52 p.m.
I heard that SSD's can't take as much physical abuse as old-school HDD's can. Yet.
 
I'm not a PC gamer, but I AM a geek, so I'd TOTALLY spend $20,000 for a totally sick-ass PC with a 2-TB PCI-E SSD (man, I hate acronyms) if I had the money, even if I continue to mostly just use the machine for Firefox browsing and writing up the occasional paper.
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