OCZ Z-Drive

OCZ has been on the forefront of the SSD revolution, with their affordable Core (v1/v2) series they have made a name for themselves, and lately with the performance previews of the new Apex SSD which features internal RAID-0 they are aiming to strike a balance between price/performance higher than the competition.

Using RAID-0 with SSD they quickly hit a bottleneck when using a SATA300 interface, with the next SATA interface speed bump still a few months away, they looked into an alternative method to squeeze more performance from a SSD RAID setup. Using a hardware based x8 PCI Express raid controller and 4x250Gb SSDs in RAID-0 they can offer an out of the box 1TB super speedy drive. PCIe 1.x x1 offers 250mb/s throughput, so their x8 card on a first generation PCIe motherboard has a theoretical limit of 2000mb/s, so there’s some headroom left!

They are using a ~$400 Highpoint RocketRAID 3520 PCI Express RAID card with 256Mb of DDR2 ECC memory as the local cache, and four MLC SSDs. They rate the Z-Drive as follows:

• Max Read: up to 600MB/s
• Max Write: up to 500MB/s
• Sustained Write: up to 400MB/s

Those are some extremely high figures, double of what the competition is currently offering in best case scenarios.

The physical drive doesn’t look like an SSD or HDD at all, since it’s based around a PCIe raid card it looks a lot more like a high end video card, size, depth and height wise!



Installation is plug and play, the only thing you’ll have to do is install the raid controller’s drivers in your OS of choice.



We only had a short time to play with the card and it was on a public booth using a OCZ configured system, the specs were:



It’s definitely not the most affordable system out there, but taking into account that the target audience for the Z-Drive will be very high end, it does make sense to match it with the appropriate hardware.

Benchmarks

Windows Vista 64-bit was installed on the Western Digital 150Gb Raptor, we had a chance to run through a quick HD Tune 3.10, testing both access times and throughput of the file system, so there’s definitely some caching action going on here.



At smaller chunk size the SSD are known for less than stellar performance, Windows works with ~4k chunk files, here we see ~100mb/s read/write performance which is quite good (understatement). As soon as the chunk size goes up you see the advantage of the PCI Express interface, scaling upwards to 1400mb/s read and 1100mb/s write speeds. Do note that these are not sustained write speeds, rather buffered/cached read and write operations which your OS and applications do a lot of.

Sisoft Sandra File system test takes a more real-world approach and its integrated database allows us to compare the results to some other popular storage solutions as the Gigabyte iRAM, a RAID-0 array of 15000rpm SCSI drives and 4xRAID-0 of the very popular WD Raptor 36Gb.



Access times with the Z-Drive are instant, same as the Gigabyte I-Ram… but look at that performance index rating of 550mb/s… just wow!

Last up was PCMark Vantage HDD testing suite which takes up 20 minutes to complete and comes up with results much higher than any SSD/I-RAM/HDD array encountered yet: total score for HDD section only 43000+



OCZ listed “up to 4Tb” by the end of the year, this would surpass any other single device (not single disk) on the market, but at what price? The 1Tb version will cost more than $1500, so it’s definitely high end. You could build your own 4 drive array with some ultra fast 32Gb X25-E Intel SSDs, the cost would be $2400+ for a 256Gb drive…

We’re definitely looking forward to see this product go retail and how the competition will react. What is sure is that OCZ has upped the ante with the Z-Drive!