OCZ presents Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD

During the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany earlier this year, OCZ showed a prototype of its Z-Drive. The company has now finished developing the PCI-Express SSD and will officially announce it tonight. Initially, three models will be released, featuring respective storage capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB. 

The Z-drive consists of multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips that are configured in RAID0 with a special controller. This construction, combined with the high bandwidth of the PCI-Express bus, allows for significantly higher speeds than a conventional SATA SSD. The RAID-controller has a 256 MB buffer. Individual specifications can be found in the diagram below. 

The SSD's are packed in a case that makes the whole look like a graphics card. There's even a fan installed on the drives. With dimensions of 245 x 124 x 22 mm, the device should fit in most cases easily. OCZ specifies the weight of the SSD's at 450 grams. The Z-drive is not only compatible with recent versions of both 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, but also supports Mac OSX 10 and up. 

OCZ's Z-drive isn't cheap: the expected prices are respectively €1.259, €1.999, and €3.059 for the 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB SSD. 

Tags: cebit sata ssd

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