OCZ Launches PCI-Express Based Z-Drive R2 SSDs

Almost four months after we originally saw them, OCZ Technology has officially launched their Z-Drive R2 series of PCIe-based SSDs. There will be three different models in the R2 series – ranging from the m84 to the p84 and p88 at the top.

Both the m84 and p84 offer sizes from 256GB to 1TB in the Z-Drive R2 format where the flash memory is located on industry standard SO-DIMM modules which enable the quick removal and replacement of those modules in the event that one of the ICs located on a specific module were to go bad. As we reported in our original story, this is one quite an ingenious engineering solution. The PCIe interface on the Z-Drive R2 is PCI-Express x8 Gen2 which enables the R2 P88, the highest performance drive, to achieve read speeds of up to 1.3GB/s and writes of up to 1GB/s with sustained writes at 550MB/s.

A picture of the Z-Drive from CES. By the looks of it, they’ve retained their originally estimated read speeds since then, but the write speeds have been revised downward.

“Our 4th generation PCIe SSD, the Z-Drive R2, tackles the performance challenges facing enterprise IT professionals head-on” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “The Z-Drive R2 is a total solution that delivers exceptional performance over a wide of range of applications due to its superior sequential performance, making it a winner in both high IOP and high-throughput environments. In addition, it is the only bootable and field serviceable PCIe SSD option on the market today, and due to an innovative interchangeable module design, it enables low cost field upgradability and capacity increases giving storage architects unprecedented flexibility.”

The upgradability and hot swap capabilities of these drives in combination with the fact that they are PCI-Express based really means to us that these drives could effectively be very useful in the enterprise space. The only problem with these drives is that they are based on MLC flash which means that they will need some sort of garbage collection to maintain performance levels over time as the drives read and write and wipe their cells. These drives, while bootable, do not feature TRIM capabilities but rather BGC or background garbage collection which similarly acts to recover lost performance. Not to mention the fact that because these are SSDs they also draw significantly less power than traditional HDDs.

Here is a shot of the Z-Drive P88 installed in a dual processor system for benchmarking purposes at CES.

The one thing that we are really waiting for is for OCZ to release a program with these SSDs that enables users to monitor their SSDs and to detect bad NAND or NAND that is about to go out. OCZ talked to us about this during CES but as far as we can tell, there is no mention of it on the site.

For more information about the entire Z-Drive R2 Series, please visit OCZ’s products page.

Original Author: Anshel Sag

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