Tuesday, March 3rd 2009

OCZ Demos 1 TB RAID0 Solid-State Drive with Unbelievable Transfer Speeds

Who would of guessed that exactly OCZ will be able to achieve the unachieveble. At CeBIT the famous overclocking memory and peripherals maker has demoed Z Drive, a PCI-Express x8 connection storage device that boasts four 256 GB (MLC-equipped) solid-state drives in RAID 0 setup. In total we get 1 TB space and 256 MB of data cache. Put this into a system with a Core i7 965 EE CPU and an ASUS P6T motherboard, get some external power for the drives, and you'll easily reach transfer speeds at up to 712 MB/s read, 500 MB/s write as well as almost zero access time, a dream come true. Now the bad news, the Z Drive is obviously going to cost a lot, about $1500 to be more precise.
Source: Revioo.com
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41 Comments on OCZ Demos 1 TB RAID0 Solid-State Drive with Unbelievable Transfer Speeds

#26
Steevo
I have two children and one wife for sale.....................
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#27
Fleck
ShadowFoldMan, if SSD's were reliable and cheap like HDD's then I might go for one of these but the price per gb is stupid right now. I only need a 200gb main drive..
SSD drives are WAY more reliable than HDD drives. I dunno about the OCZ ones though, people have been having all sorts of problems with OCZ's drives and so far they've been slower than other offerings. Supposedly Patriot SSD drives are the best.
ValdezYou can buy a 64-128gb ssd for OS and often used apps, and use hdd-s for storage.
Which is exactly what I plan to do. Two 32GB RAID0 SSD drives for OS which fill fit all the apps and games I'll ever need. $100 each is a low price to pay for applications and games loading more or less INSTANTLY.
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#28
phanbuey
Im waiting for windows 7 before i get any SSD drives, reinstalling vista and all my apps is a PITA and its not worth it knowing that 7 is around the corner.

Plus 7 is coded to take advantage of SSD's while vista tries to mini-write them to death.
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#29
BOSE
I dont see any use for this at all. Besides your games loading at 0.01 of a second, or using Photoshop, other wise its useless for just storing your data and porn.
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#30
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Musselspower and size constraints could have got in the way.
Size of the PCI-E interface has little or no impact on the size of the card. It doesn't seem like there are heatsinks inside that card. SSDs are lightweight devices. As for power, the 2~3W of power a typical 2.5" SSD consumes should tell you that even 10 of those in RAID shouldn't matter, even a PCI-E x1 slot should be able to power it.
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#31
Fleck
BOSEI dont see any use for this at all. Besides your games loading at 0.01 of a second, or using Photoshop, other wise its useless for just storing your data and porn.
Actually when SSD becomes as cheap and abundant as platter storage, it'll be 1) absolutely quiet, 2) 100 times more reliable because of no moving parts, and 3) consume a lot less power.
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#32
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
btarunrSize of the PCI-E interface has little or no impact on the size of the card. It doesn't seem like there are heatsinks inside that card. SSDs are lightweight devices. As for power, the 2~3W of power a typical 2.5" SSD consumes should tell you that even 10 of those in RAID shouldn't matter, even a PCI-E x1 slot should be able to power it.
size, the more chips they add, the bigger and heavier it gets. dont forget they need a RAID controller on there as well.

Power: see above about RAID controller. until they release specs we cant be sure how much power it actually uses.
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#33
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Musselssize, the more chips they add, the bigger and heavier it gets. dont forget they need a RAID controller on there as well.

Power: see above about RAID controller. until they release specs we cant be sure how much power it actually uses.
Four MLC SSDs, would mean 2~3 NAND flash chips + controller + NVRAM chips each. Five chips each SSD, plus one or two for the RAID complex. That would make the card long, but they still wouldn't outweigh a single-slot graphics card with a reasonably sized heatsink (eg: GeForce 8800 GT, Radeon HD 4850). The fact that you don't see fan-vents or such in any of those pictures tell that the card doesn't have an active cooling system either. So that still isn't enough weight to warrant PCI-E x8 interface. Afterall, PCI-E x8 is just an inch of extra leverage with the motherboard, still insignificant if the card was that heavy.

If leverage is all that they wanted (while compromising on the compatibility), they would've given this rather fat card a dual-slot design, to hold on better with the system case.
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#34
BOSE
FleckActually when SSD becomes as cheap and abundant as platter storage, it'll be 1) absolutely quiet, 2) 100 times more reliable because of no moving parts, and 3) consume a lot less power.
I know, but not this particular setup. If you bought it today, there is not much use for it on home PC. Cant even install OS on it.
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#35
Fleck
BOSEthis particular setup
Oh, yeah, that's what you were referring to.

No doubt, this is just a lot of showing off. It might be good for someone's server. I guess it all depends on implementation. Video editing has got to be jaw-dropping on it though.
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#36
Steevo
BOSEI know, but not this particular setup. If you bought it today, there is not much use for it on home PC. Cant even install OS on it.
Who needs to intstall. Create a image, and run that, failsafe for viri and malware infection, and update the image as needed, install games on a seperate drive, and the OS image, and just perform a copy function to the SSD.


I am running a basterdized copy of Windows 7, it runs all everyting out of Vista, like AOD, and other things, you just have to assign file associations and a few other items. I could use WAIK to create a full image to boot from a network drive. www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=958823 as mentioned here, but I have not the resources for a new media server yet.
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#37
Hayder_Master
thanx malware for this cool news, what kind of this crazy things coming up wow this is impressive storage drive
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#38
stasdm
Good volume, bad performance

Good volume, very bad performance (think using better RAID controller would not raise the price too much). PCIe drive should perform at least 1.2GB/s read, 0.9-1GB/s write, else no sence to occupy the slot.

Well, the price @ $1.5 per 1GB is exellent for solution
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#39
TreadR
xkcheYes, is like ioDrive.... you can´t boot from this drive...
No need to... the boot partition doesn't need to be the same as the Sytem partition.
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#40
Disparia
I believe I missed where it was said that this isn't bootable?

The Fusion-IO isn't, but a bootable model is coming. Why something that simple wasn't included in the first model, IDK, but anyhoo...
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#41
Lu(ky
Do you guys realize that they were selling a the Fusion-IO IODrive 80GB Solid State Drive (SSD) for $3000.00 and all you get is 80GB for that. So for OCZ to come out with this LARGE VOLUME SSD is a huge gain for the market. It will only drive prices down and down and the prices will come down to earth for us all. So you do the math a 1T of space vs 80GB cost less then half of the 80GB model... MMMmmm
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