14 DAY TRIAL // New solid state drives are launched every week, even with the consolidation of the market. By which we mean that larger storage device makers have mostly assimilated the smaller ones by this stage.
Update November 25, 2014: OCZ toldus via Twitter that the price of the Saber 1000 Series will be around $0.60 / €0.48 per GB. That means $144 / €115 for 240GB, $244 / €196 for 480 GB and $576 / €463 for 960 GB. Probably ten to twenty extra after VAT and shipping costs are added.
@Softpedia Saber 1000 will be roughly $0.60 per GB
— OCZ Enterprise (@OCZEnterprise) November 24, 2014
Case in point, OCZ was bought by Toshiba not that long ago, and is now OCZ Storage Solutions, a sub-unit of the larger corporation.
It was an essential move for Toshiba, one might say, since it's the distant third greatest maker of HDDs on the market, so it can only offset the disadvantage there by being a stronger presence on the SSD market.
Toshiba's 19nm manufacturing technology is the most advanced available for NAND Flash-based storage products at this time. With OCZ being part of it now, that technology is being used in the new enterprise-class Saber 1000 SSD Series.
OCZ Saber 1000 SSD Series
Enterprise storage devices can afford to provide higher level specifications, from storage capacity to performance, since large companies are normally willing to pay more than consumers.
High specs aren't the only thing needed though. Enterprise storage units also need a superior endurance and data safety and retention.
Since servers and data centers usually have to run 24/7, it is important that the storage units have some way to cope with the shocks of instant power loss or drive failures.
Saber 1000 Series use a technique called Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+ for short) to hold up SSD circuitry for a short time in case power is suddenly cut. It ensures the unit is fully operational once power returns.
The StoragePeak 1000 SSD Management System is another asset, allowing IT managers to connect from a central station to the drives and manage the units (and other OCZ resources) via a web-based management interface.
The system can connect to multiple Linux and Windows hosts at once and shows the SSDs' connections to servers, storage arrays and appliances. Finally, StragePeak 1000 SSD Management System allows managers to set up alert systems with corrective IT actions that can be initiated as soon as a problem is detected.
As for actual specs, the SSDs can have 240 GB, 460 GB and 960 GB capacities, with transfer speeds of 470 MB/s write and 550 MB/s read, corresponding to 90,000 IOPS random 4K read and 20,000 IOPS random writes.
Practical applications
The OCZ enterprise-class Saber 1000 SSD Series solid state drives are intended for Video-On Demand (VoD), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), read cache and indexing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), media streaming, front-end web server, cloud infrastructure, and online archiving.
Unfortunately, their prices and sales dates around the world were not included in the press release.
