OCZ to Unveil Z-Drive R4 Series PCI-Express SSDs Today

I'm sure this drive will be insanely fast. And super-expensive too ...

Once a PC enthusiast-centric company, OCZ is taking the solid state drive business seriously, across all market segments, consumer-thru-enterprise. The company now has SSDs in nearly all form-factors, making use of nearly all industry standard interfaces, it even has its own high-bandwidth interface modelled. Some of its highest performance SSDs are in the PCI-Express addon card form-factor, that include SSDs with transfer rates well within the gigabyte per second range.

OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen will be holding a conference call with the press later today, in which he will be talking about the company's enterprise SSD business, and unveil a new PCI-Express SSD, called Z-Drive R4. Z-Drive is OCZ's enterprise PCI-E SSD targeted at systems in which throughput is everything. The Z-Drive R4 was spotted at this year's Computex event, it is essentially a PCI-Express 2.0 x8 addon card that has an 8-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, driving eight, yes, eight SSD subunits in RAID 0. Each subunit consists of a SandForce SF-2281 controller with its own NAND flash memory. As with all compound SSDs, the RAID 0 volume is completely abstract to the host machine.

The Z-Drive R4 offers transfer rates of up to 2,900 MB/s read; 2,700 MB/s write; and 350,000 IOPS 4K random write performance. It will be available in a number of NAND flash architecture options, including SLC, MLC, and eMLC. Further, it will be sold in two major variants, the C-series and R-series. The C-series will be available in capacities ranging from 480 GB to 3.84 TB; while the R-series will be available in capacities of 800 GB to 3.20 TB. The C-series uses less NAND flash overprovisioning yielding more capacity, and unlike the R-series, has lower protection from sudden power loss.