The future of storage lies in the hands of those developing faster, higher capacity and more affordable solid state drives. This year, at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, OCZ has demoed a product that takes the performance of SSDs to the next level. Dubbed the OCZ Z drive, this product comes to provide its users with an MLC technology that is incorporated in a 1TB SSD solution. While the specifications on this thing are impressive to say the least, you will really be amazed when you take a look at some benchmark results.

The latest OCZ Z Drive is a one-terabyte MLC-based SSD that features 256MB of local cache as well as a hardware-based RAID controller. The Z Drive has been developed to fulfill the needs of the high-end segment, and it is able to offer impressive performance levels, as well as functionality and response, although it will not come too cheap.

The specs of the OCZ Z Drive also show it sporting 256MB of DDR II memory with ECC protection, as well as a PCI-Express x8 interface, while being able to provide a maximum read speed of 600MB/s, as well as a maximum write speed of up to 500MB/s. In addition, it is also able to deliver a sustained write speed of up to 400MB/s.

We've already seen OCZ showcase a wide range of high-end new products at the CeBIT show in Hanover, and it seems that the company has some other parts hidden up its sleeve as well. Among them, we can count the new Lockdown ultra-durable USB drive, meant to keep data safe from accidental drops and spills, and which will be available in capacities of up to 32GB, as well as the new 80+ Gold Certified Z Series PSU, able to deliver more than 90-percent efficiency.



Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2009 Hanover, Germany.