News - OCZ's Z-Drive makes it into production. 1TB SSD with 500MB/s speeds

[HEXUS]

Click to find out how much it is likely to cost!

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[scaryjim]

if I had > £2000 lying around spare I'd certainly consider it for my next HTPC 250GB OCZ Siolid series SSDs currently cost £545 (at Scan, anyway), so it's about the same price as getting 4 of those and RAID 0ing them, but without using up your SATAs. So you could have one of these for storing those huge raw video files on perhaps? Or using as swap space? and still have 4TB of ordinary SATA drives for general use?

[pollaxe]

Anyone want to buy a kidney?

[CK_1985]

I can't believe they actually made a production version! crazy performance, crazy price, just general craziness...

To be fair though, it's not actually that expensive when you consider the cost of the drives on their own... Just a shame I don't have a spare PCI-E slot on my mobo or I'd be out buying one right now

[Nelviticus]

I can't see the point of it unless you're editing enormous video files. If you just want storage space then you don't need ridiculous speed. Buy a smaller SSD for your applications and a big mechanical drive for your data - you don't need all your storage to be super-fast.

[EarlGrey]

Test it please HEXUS!
Give us some benchmarks, does it really hit these speeds, and does it perhaps manage them only on the first write, and not subsequent writes?

[directhex]

Is that a single or double slot footprint?

[borandi]

Is that a single or double slot footprint?

Looks like it takes up 2-slots.

Though they say you need a 16x slot, yet it only has the 1x slot pin config.

[Tarinder]

It's a 22mm-thick enclosure so, depending upon motherboard, may just take up a single slot's footprint.

Most double-width graphics cards tend to be around 35mm.

[scaryjim]

... it only has the 1x slot pin config.

Looks like an x4 to me - as detailed in the article ("hooking up to the system via a PCIe x4 link", just below the picture) The prototype shown at CeBIT had x16, but they've obviously decided that was overkill.

[shaithis]

I think the article refers to the original demo/concept model being 16x but the actual released product being 4x (at least that was how I read it).

The connector does look like a 4x to me, 1x is really really small.

[dangel]

I can't see the point of it unless you're editing enormous video files. If you just want storage space then you don't need ridiculous speed. Buy a smaller SSD for your applications and a big mechanical drive for your data - you don't need all your storage to be super-fast.

I do.

No, really. ish.

TBH the biggest bottleneck is the speed of storage - i can only image how much giggling i'd do with my whole filesystem being this fast

[directhex]

It's a 22mm-thick enclosure so, depending upon motherboard, may just take up a single slot's footprint.

Most double-width graphics cards tend to be around 35mm.

So crap for 1U systems then

Never mind

[cordas]

Hey if I win 66 million on tonights lottery I will take a couple of them....

Otherwise... as it said in the article these are great headline grabbing products designed to do specifically that... grab headlines, who knows they might even shift a few of them but I doubt it will be many.

[GaryRW]

i do wonder whether with the price drops on SSD's - will stuff like this become even vaguely mainstream (i.e. non-lottery winners) before the next version of sata comes onstream? The SSd's look like they'll hit the sata II 300MBs limit reasonably quickly. Maybe pci express is the way to go.

What is the max transfer rate of pci express x4 and x16 anyway??

[Jay]

what is the point? Too costly for home use and not designed for enterprise.