OCZ's New Blazing Fast 1TB Z SSD Drive

OCZ was demonstrating its new Z Drive with 1 TB of storage at CeBIT 2009 this week. 

The new Z Drive from OCZ is a storage device that connects to an x8 PCIe slot and offers 1 terabyte of storage capacity.  The Z Drive is about the same size a dual-slot graphics card, so its not exactly small, but the device is stated to offer maximum read and write speeds of up to 600 MB/sec. and 500 MB/sec., respectively.  According to the demo OCZ had on display at CeBIT though, the Z Drive was actually showing minimum and maximum read speeds of 654 MB/sec. and 712 MB/sec., respectively. Incredible.

In a lot of ways, OCZ's new Z Drive appears similar to Fusion-io's ioDrive, both of which connect to a PCIe slot and offer seemingly similar transfer speeds. Unlike the smaller ioDrive however, the new Z Drive is apparently comprised of just four 256 GB MLC-based SSDs in RAID 0.  The Z Drive also features a hardware-based RAID controller and 256 MB of local cache.  Lets hope the use of local cache did not unfairly inflate the results we are seeing though, as previous reviews of four Intel X-25E SSDs in RAID 0 showed transfer speeds only hitting as high as 366 MB/sec.

As expected, the new OCZ Z Drive will not be cheap.  According to Revioo.com, $1500 is the expected price, but that is still less than the cost of an 80 GB Fusion-io's ioDrive and possibly less than a do-it-yourself solution.  No word yet on availability, but the Z Drive being demoed at CeBIT was apparently a fully functioning prototype.