OCZ Technology, one of the world's leading vendors of high-performance memory and Flash-based storage products, has announced today the official debut of its new Z-Drive, a PCI-Express Solid State Drive that has been specifically designed to meet the performance requirements of today's enterprise computing clients. With the announcement, the San Jose, California-based company has introduced two new models, the Z-Drive p84 and the Z-Drive e84. The difference between the two is that the former is built with an NAND MLC-based solution, while the latter offers a performance boost with an SLC-based configuration.

“Traditional enterprise storage technology typically requires overly complex infrastructure as well [as] costly maintenance, and is often unable to deliver the level of performance required by OEM applications,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “The new OCZ Z-Drive is an all-in-one high performance plug-and-play bootable PCI-E solid state drive that addresses these challenges head on, and meets the demands of the complete range of enterprise storage and data access requirements. The Z-Drive is designed not only to be higher performing and more reliable than conventional solutions, but also to significantly reduce both the maintenance and overall TCO for our clients.”

The Z-Drive has been designed on a more convenient PCI-Express interface, which allows the drive to deliver a high performance level, in both MLC and SLC models. According to the memory vendor, the p84 model can achieve speeds of up to 750MB/s and 650MB/s for read and write, respectively. The SLC-based Z-Drive e84 can deliver a slight boost of speed, reaching 800MB/s for read and 750MB/s for write. The drives can achieve maximum IOPS (4k file size – random write) of 10,000 and 16,000 for the p84 and e84, respectively.

Although no pricing details have been made available, you can expect these storage solutions to be pricey, considering their targeted segment and overall specifications. However, the drives will probably be available in capacities of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB (for the p84).