14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives are definitely advancing at a rapid pace, whether they are IDE, SATA, external or designed to communicate directly with the PCI Express interface. Of all such products, the PCI Express drives are the ones that can reach the highest data transfers. OCZ is already offering a range of such devices as part of its Z-Drive line. Of these, the new Z-Drive m84 and the Z-Drive p88 are currently on display at CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.
PCI Express solid state drives are known for their ability to reach read and write speeds far above those of the SATA or USB storage units. This is possible because the PCI Express interface has a bandwidth large enough for the flash memory to operate at its full potential. A representative of this type of storage products is the Z-Drive line from OCZ. Now that CeBIT is well underway, the company has decided to show off two of its latest models that might cause any and all observers to look upon them in awe.
The first thing that the Z-Drive m84 and Z-Drive p88 seem to aim for is demolishing the storage-space gap that exists between Flash-based SSDs and hard disk drives. As such, the m84 comes in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB forms, whereas the more capacious and overall superior p88 boasts capacities of 512GB, 1TB and even 2TB. Coupled with the high data rates allowed by the PCI Express interface, the new Z-Drives are set to enable newer, faster and significantly more responsive enterprise applications, such as servers and data centers, or lightning-fast desktops.
The Z-Drive m84, according to the spec sheet on display alongside the device, can read at up to 870MB/s and has a maximum writing speed of 780MB/s. These capabilities are already noteworthy, but they are made to look humble in front of the performance that the p88 can achieve. According to the storage-solution developer, this model can reach a read speed of 1.3 GB/s and a write speed of 1.2GB/s. Granted, these are the preliminary, unofficial specifications, but the drives will definitely grab some attention if the official numbers even reach 1GB/s.
Both units are based on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND Flash memory chips and operate on the PCI Express X8 interface. Unfortunately, no pricing or availability details are known at this time.
Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.
