OCZ Z-Drive SSD 1TB 712 MB/s read, 500 MB/s write

I thought I read the title wrong when coming into the thread.

But holy shit! That's amazing. But who knows how far away they are from the public if the drives we have available to use are what, 1/3 that?

And re-reading the article, that's 4 250GB SSD's in Raid 0.

Either way, that's fantastic! $$$$$$$$
 
I must say, it is a bit big. Question is, why get one of these instead of 4 SSDs and a decent RAID card? Would be pretty identical spec wise then (and performance as well) and probably cheaper. I have a feeling that that's exactly what is hiding in that shell anyway.
 
I'd stick with the 1x 5.25" or 2x 3.5" drive bay to controller option myself. Waste of expansion card space IMO.
 
This should give some much needed competition at the high end SSD range. It it really works out it would blow fusion-io clean out of water for value.
 
Blue Fox said:
I must say, it is a bit big. Question is, why get one of these instead of 4 SSDs and a decent RAID card? Would be pretty identical spec wise then (and performance as well) and probably cheaper. I have a feeling that that's exactly what is hiding in that shell anyway.
Click to expand...

+1, not to mention with your own controller you can swap the drives out.
 
Not convinced... an array of 256GB MLCs? I think that's just asking for trouble.
How is this different from just raiding a bunch of problematic jmicron SSDs together?
Notice that no IOPs are even mentioned - just sustained transfer rates, which don't really mean much?

I'd also prefer just getting individual drives and connecting them to a proper controller than this proprietary add-in card stuff. Even the Fusion IO is probably better - I think they at least use SLC in that one.
 
alamone said:
Not convinced... an array of 256GB MLCs? I think that's just asking for trouble.
How is this different from just raiding a bunch of problematic jmicron SSDs together?
Notice that no IOPs are even mentioned - just sustained transfer rates, which don't really mean much?

I'd also prefer just getting individual drives and connecting them to a proper controller than this proprietary add-in card stuff. Even the Fusion IO is probably better - I think they at least use SLC in that one.
Click to expand...
It looks like it was just slapped together from my point of view. You could put everything onto one PCB. Same goes for the power connectors. Why not just draw power from the PCIe slot? Lazy and quick design to me.

The FusionIO stuff is actually available in SLC and MLC.
 
I think we will a some gaming edition SSDs out soon offering even faster transfer speeds but as always with a higher price.
 
Some people are under the mistaken impression that SLC is better than MLC and it's because of the recent issues with random write performance because of the JMicron controller, so let's set the record straight once and for all:

MLC SSD technology is fully capable of outperforming SLC SSD technology simply by nature of design (multiple levels as compared to just a single one). Yes I know it sounds stupid but dem's da facts, Jack.

The recent issues with MLC hardware are specifically related to devices that used a specific JMicron data controller which had issue with multiple queued tasks at one time which does not mean just because it was working with an MLC based SSD.

Acronym hell, ain't it?

So, as most companies are well aware of the issues with that JMicron controller they aren't using them anymore in new SSD hardware, both SLC and MLC devices, and this OCZ product is most certainly a new one. They would not come out with the claims and the specs they're provided if it couldn't actually do the deed, that much is for sure. It's truly a high end top level enthusiast product but I already know a handful of clients that I work with that'll be tossing me their AMEX cards as soon as I tell 'em they're available... probably buying more than one at a time too. Wish I could toss money around like that... bleh.

Regardless, the fact is MLC does not mean hampered performance, far from it. The recent MLC SSD issues because of that JMicron controller have seemingly tainted the entire SSD attitude for a lot of people, so, do be so ignorant if you can help it. :)

MLC = a damned good thing, and superior to SLC when implemented properly... and not tied to that damned JMicron controller which is now a thing of the past with all the new 2nd/3rd generation SSD hardware that's coming out this year.

Hope this helps...
 
I think you're mistaken about MLC being better than SLC. MLC is slower than SLC due to design (and less reliable).
 
Actually, no, it doesn't help at all. Your attitude doesn't help either.
It isn't as black and white as "MLC is better than SLC."
Sure you get more capacity for less cost.
But as mentioned, due to the inherent design,
MLC has its own share of problems to deal with.
Storagesearch.com has a good summary which I'll repaste here:

"In an MLC memory chip the stored charge is interpreted as a range of values (0 to 3), (0 to 7) etc - which depends on the ability of the discrimator circuits surrounding the memory array to reliably tell the difference between levels.

The logical memory capacity of a such a cell is 2 bits, or 3 bits etc - where the bits are binary.

Discriminating multiple levels is difficult to achieve technically - because it involves an analog to digital conversion process - and due to manufacturing tolerances the same charge may not represent the identical value in another part of the chip.

There are also various factors which make the process unrepeatable - by dumping charge into the cell when adjacent parts of the chip are being written to, by leakage from the cell into the substrate over time, and by damage in the transistor material due to successive writes (endurance).

MLC designers overcome these problems (which become harder in each shrink generation) by wrapping blocks of memory in protective error correction and detection codes.

Because the charge in an MLC cell is interpreted as 2x, 4x etc more data than in the same geometry level SLC chip - MLC is much more sensitive to age and wear-out factors than SLC. That's why oems typically quote an endurance figure which is 10x lower."
 
Well, in my own testing as well as reading tech journals and watching god knows how many webinars, etc... seems MLC can do a bit more when properly implemented, hence me making that particular mention of "when properly implemented" and nobody seems to have done that just yet. :D
 
Properly implemented? If there was some magical thing to make MLC faster and better than SLC, don't you think someone would have done it by now? As stated before, you have it backwards. MLC design allows for lower cost, but it makes it inherently slower than SLC.

Lets compare high end SSDs shall we? I'm going to use Intel since their MLC stuff is relatively fast compared to the competition. Lets not forget that higher density helps out with performance.

X25-E 64gb (SLC):
  • 270mb/s Read
  • 170mb/s Write
  • 2M hour MTBF
  • Lifetime: 1PB of writes

X25-M 160gb (MLC):
  • 250mb/s Read
  • 70mb/s Write
  • 1.2M hour MTBF
  • Lifetime: 5 years minimum

You would think that Intel, being a company with nearly 100000 employees, would figure out a way to make MLC better than SLC with some 'proper implementation'. Their engineers know a hell of a lot more than random people on the internet.

How about Fusion-IO? They're supposed to be the golden standard when it comes to SSDs. Lets have a look shall we:

160gb (SLC):
  • 600 MB/s (random 16K) writes
  • 700 MB/s (random 16K) reads
  • IOPS: 104,400 (random 4k reads)
  • IOPS: 103,925 (random 4k writes)
  • Latency: 50μs Read
  • Lifetime: 48yrs (5TB written a day)

320gb (MLC):
  • 500 MB/s (random 8K) writes
  • 700 MB/s (random 32K) reads
  • IOPS: 60,000 (random 4k reads)
  • IOPS: 79,000 (random 4k writes)
  • Latency: 80μs Read
  • Lifetime:16yrs (5TB written a day)
 
Yet their engineers managed to get a bug in that ruins their drives when they start to fill up?

For the record, I don't think that the MLC technology is better than the SLC. I think it is pretty clear that it is not. That doesn't change the fact that the price/performance ratio is leaning very heavily on the side of MLC at the moment.

I say let's readdress after we get some real world numbers on the vertex and samsung drives. Maybe the new summit as well. The second generation SSD controllers are doing wondrous things for MLC drives. Third generation should be even better.
 
From what I can tell the only thing that MLC has going for it is price. SLC is faster, and more reliable according to all the specs and reviews I have ever seen.

That being said, I own 7 MLC drives in 2 separate RAID 0 arrays and they are plenty fast. There is something to be said for price.

One of my RAID arrays is 4 X 30 gig OCZ Solid drives hooked to a Dell Perc 5i. Cost me about $500 bux for a 120 gig version of the Z drive. The price mentioned is not bad considering you are also getting a fairly high end Raid controller thrown into the mix. My setup is capped at about 400 MB/sec by the Perc 5.

Don
 
PC_User said:
:eek::eek::eek: Quite a hefty price to pay... Must start looking for work now.
Click to expand...

If this is the best incentive you can come up with to get a job, I think you have other trouble than to get the 1500 bucks to purchase this piece of still born hardware! :p

And by still born, I mean that I doubt this will be of any use, seeing as you can get other, more elegant, better performing and less pricy options than this, already available today, so they're making a piece of hardware that is already obsolete.
 
spazoid said:
If this is the best incentive you can come up with to get a job, I think you have other trouble than to get the 1500 bucks to purchase this piece of still born hardware! :p

And by still born, I mean that I doubt this will be of any use, seeing as you can get other, more elegant, better performing and less pricy options than this, already available today, so they're making a piece of hardware that is already obsolete.
Click to expand...

I'd like you to show me where you get 1tb of ssd space, controller, and some form factor that will save costs and be silent at the same time for that price....

Seriously, go for it... a 250gb SSD right now is about $622 each... thats $2,488, a good controller for it is about $250 and then an appropriate enclosure would be about 100 bucks... now were at $2,838
 
Ockie said:
I'd like you to show me where you get 1tb of ssd space, controller, and some form factor that will save costs and be silent at the same time for that price....
Click to expand...

That's were it rocks for me.
 
Ockie said:
I'd like you to show me where you get 1tb of ssd space, controller, and some form factor that will save costs and be silent at the same time for that price....

Seriously, go for it... a 250gb SSD right now is about $622 each... thats $2,488, a good controller for it is about $250 and then an appropriate enclosure would be about 100 bucks... now were at $2,838
Click to expand...

A controller than can get you that kind of throughput is going to run more in the $7-800 dollar range. My Perc 5i caps around 400 MB/sec, and it is not a light weight.

It really aint a bad deal for the hardware you are getting. It will be interesting to see some real world reviews once it escapes the lab.

Don
 
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DonDon said:
A controller than can get you that kind of throughput is going to run more in the $7-800 dollar range. My Perc 5i caps around 400 MB/sec, and it is not a light weight.

It really aint a bad deal for the hardware you are getting. It will be interesting to see some real world reviews once it escapes the lab.

Don
Click to expand...


I was using a low number (such as an adaptec 3405) just for argumentative sake and so someone can't come and say "you're wrong, it's $199" or something stupid. You just reinforced my point even more that performance such as that will take a much higher end controller.... and we're not even talking about the cables or anything of that nature that is typically not included.
 
DonDon said:
A controller than can get you that kind of throughput is going to run more in the $7-800 dollar range. My Perc 5i caps around 400 MB/sec, and it is not a light weight.

It really aint a bad deal for the hardware you are getting. It will be interesting to see some real world reviews once it escapes the lab.

Don
Click to expand...

The card would only need 4 ports (considering 4 SSDs) so it is very unlikely that a controller that could handle that would cost 700+. Typically the 500+ range consists of 8+ port cards. For example, the Adaptec 5405 (1.2ghz IOP) is only ~$330 and has 4 ports (1x miniSAS). The Adaptec 5805 (also 1.2ghz IOP) is about ~$500 and has 8 ports (2x miniSAS).
 
Volkum said:
The card would only need 4 ports (considering 4 SSDs) so it is very unlikely that a controller that could handle that would cost 700+. Typically the 500+ range consists of 8+ port cards. For example, the Adaptec 5405 (1.2ghz IOP) is only ~$330 and has 4 ports (1x miniSAS). The Adaptec 5805 (also 1.2ghz IOP) is about ~$500 and has 8 ports (2x miniSAS).
Click to expand...

That still reinforces my point :)


This is a great and cheap solution for a lot of performance out of a device. I am personally going to look into this and the ioFusion and weigh the options. The only thing right now that I'm aware of is that the ioFusion seems to be kinda vaporware and non-bootable as of yet.
 
The FusionIO card is not vaporware. You can purchase them through various channels but it is mostly only businesses that can afford them. Making them bootable would definitly be nice though. They will have a hard time making headway into the enterprise market though without making their products 5 9's on availability. They aren't engineered properly for that right now.
 
This is just proof of concept. And the price is just that. Pulled out of the ass to create buzz.
I hope this is not the way SSD is going to take. By that I mean RAID0

I would take a equally fast single drive over raid0, thank you very much.
But chances of that happening soon are slim if most hardware developers will take the easier route and just Raid the hell out of current SSDs and slow down R&D on better single drives...
 
hasoos said:
The FusionIO card is not vaporware. You can purchase them through various channels but it is mostly only businesses that can afford them. Making them bootable would definitly be nice though. They will have a hard time making headway into the enterprise market though without making their products 5 9's on availability. They aren't engineered properly for that right now.
Click to expand...

I was referring to the desktop version which is supposed to be 80gb in capacity and feature 1,000 price point + bootability.

So far it's vaporware for all I'm concerned, it was supposed to be out already last year IIRC. Yes you can buy the enterprise versions for 3-20k, sure.
 
XS Janus said:
This is just proof of concept. And the price is just that. Pulled out of the ass to create buzz.
I hope this is not the way SSD is going to take. By that I mean RAID0

I would take a equally fast single drive over raid0, thank you very much.
But chances of that happening soon are slim if most hardware developers will take the easier route and just Raid the hell out of current SSDs and slow down R&D on better single drives...
Click to expand...

High end SSDs like G.skill Titan and Vertex are already RAID0 internally. SSDs are by principle always in some kind of raid unless you are using only a single chip. Traditional drives have only one read head to work with and SSDs access multiple chips at the same time.
 
who needs 1TB of SSD storage? do you really have that many apps?
storing media files on a SSD is stupid
and if you need high throughput for video editing or something, buy some single platter drives for RAID0 - way cheaper and way more space
 
It's not just this one product. It's the general direction where storage is heading. The mear fact that they are bringing out such a product gives us a glimpse into the future. And it don't involve spinning platters.

I can remember getting my first 500 meg drive wondering what the hell I would ever do with all that space. 6 months later I had figured that one out and started having to delete things.

Hard drives will not go away overnight, but their days are numbered.

Time marches on, and I would not be investing a whole lota money in magnetic drive manufacturers.

Don
 
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