OCZ Technology, one of the world's leading vendors of high-performance NAND Flash-based memory products, has recently announced the introduction of its high-performance Z-Drive, a PCI-Express Solid State Drive, which the company showcased earlier this year at the CeBIT 2009 show in Hanover, Germany. Designed to meet the high-performance requirements of all those computer enthusiasts and overclockers, the new Z-Drive promises a high-level of performance in a PCI-Express-based solution.

 

“It is our goal to deliver tailored SSD solutions for the complete spectrum of high performance applications,” said Eugene Chang, vice president of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. “Designed for ultra high performance consumers, the Z-Drive takes the SATA bottleneck out of the equation by employing the ultra fast PCI-Express architecture with a RAID controller and four Vertex controllers configured in four-way RAID 0 within an all-in-one product, making this solution ideal for applications that put a premium on both storage performance and maximum capacity.”

 

The officially announced Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD comes in a different casing, compared with the one that was showcased at CeBIT. As far as technical specifications are concerned, the Z-Drive from OCZ is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities. It features a 256MB of on-board cache, RAID controller, a PCI-Express interface and an MTBF of 1.5 million hours.

 

Each different capacity model offers different performance specifications. The lower-capacity 250GB configuration is rated at a maximum read/write speed of 450MB/s and 300MB/s, respectively. With the 500GB model, the maximum read and write speeds reach 510MB/s and 480MB/s, while on the 1TB model, these are rated at 500MB/s and 470MB/s, respectively. For all models, the sustained write speed is specified at 200MB/s.

 

Unfortunately, the company hasn't released any details regarding the pricing and availability of its latest Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD.