- Friday, 27 November 2009
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Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing - Robert Benchley
OCZ shows 1TB SSD RAID module
ONE COMPANY THAT tends to put out halo products that actually make it into production is OCZ, and its Z Drive 1TB SDD looks like the next big thing. Couple this to 80+ Gold PSUs, and you have a pretty nice system.
1TB SSD RAID card
The star of the booth was obviously the Z Drive prototype, a large metal case filled with four SSDs, a RAID controller and a bunch of cache that plugs directly into a PCIe slot. The idea is simple, most interfaces would bottleneck anything capable of this level of transfers, so they stuck it on the one that would not, a PCIe slot.
How fast is fast? 750MBps sustained, 1200 burstable should be enough for most applications, and would allow Vista to boot in an almost tolerable time. If 1TB isn't enough for you, there is a two TB version coming, but don't expect either to be cheap. The case will change, the prices change hourly with flash, and it will be done when it is done. That said, it will be a product somewhat soon.
OCZ also claims that it will be the first to ship an 80+ Gold certified PSU. A lot of people were showing them off, but only OCZ is confident it will have the first one you can buy, likely in a few weeks. This is the highest efficiency rating possible, a claimed 93 per cent, making the Z1000 1000W model one of the best (almost) on the market.
One last tidbit, OCZ Summit 64G SSDs now are shipping with Samsung memory. They should be fast, but We'll take a Z Drive over that any day. µ
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... but nothing too amazing. All they've done is stick 4 Vertex or Summit drives and a standard 4-port PCIe SATA adapter into a single case.
The unfortunate thing is that these PCIE drives aren't bootable yet. Until someone figures out a way to make that possible (BIOS tweak? Change first boot device to PCIE instead of SATA? Obviously requires new BIOS to give option) most people won't bother. I don't really need a large ultra fast drive that I can't boot from.
I wonder if things like this(PCI-E Drives) will change how mobos are made in the future. The "bootable" part is just a tweak in the bios, easy for a board manufacture to do, I guess. But pretty interesting,though, I don't think this will survive the market.
i'd give them £60 for one
Its more than just some SSD's in an eggbox! It isn't mentioned here but when properly driven this thing should be limited by the pcie bus xfer limits rather than the sata limits so you *should* be able to achieve ridiculous bandwidth transfers...check out the fusionio iodrive...
Um, don't know if you guys (those that say you cannot boot from PCI-e) looked at server tech. You CAN boot from PCI-e.
It'd be fast, in theory, now for some numbers pls!
@Too bad...
You can definitely boot with PCI-E, why do you think current PCI-E SATA cards could enter the market without being bootable?
While I know FusionIO et al exist, I'd be willing to put beer on this just being SATA drives in a box. Perhaps they'll go as far as sticking everything all on one PCB, but that'll be it.
Why? Well, two reasons. One, OCZ isn't an engineering company, they're a marketing company (PCP&C buyout notwithstanding). They primarily license existing designs, rather than contracting out new ones. Making a box of SATA drives is trivial - they can buy the SATA card design off the shelf pretty cheap and have it all done in no time.
On the other hand, the the engineering required to get a non-SATA SSD going is considerable, and would almost certinly cost north of $1m. Throwing that much cash at a new design, for a halo product, would be very unlike the previous actions of OCZ.
The second point is that the numbers match up very nicely to the 250 GB Vertex and Summit drives. Additionally, if you were designing a "native" (direct PCIe- flash) drive, you'd stick enough channels of flash on there to fill the 8 PCIe lanes (2 GB/sec each way), or at least come close. Especially if you're designing a halo product.
Finally, the OCZ blurb itself (see engadget) says that it has a "hardware RAID controller", which suggests that it's SATA, not "native".
One thing I forgot to mention is that the 1200 MB/sec burst speed matches up exactly to 4 SATA channels.
@Zepth
Re-read the article it said a raid controller + drives. And I've yet to see a quality bios that can't boot from a raid controller :) I used a Highpoint Rocketraid at home in a PCIe slot.
Not too bad you are week late posting this. If you can't get it within a few days don't bother posting old news.
Would it appear that my pc is never sluggish with a hard drive like that?
Price - can any of you give some guesses at the price of this thing, rough estimates and possible price 6 months after launch would be nice. I'm guessing $1k.
HI THERE I FOUND OUT THAT OCZ 1 TB SSD IS ONLY $1,500 COOL COOL