OCZ to Unveil Next-Gen Z-Drive R4 PCI Express SSDs on August 2

OCZ Technology, a well-known manufacturer of solid state drives and other computer hardware components, has just announced that it plans to introduce its next-generation high-performance Z-Drive R4 PCI Express SSD during a conference call scheduled to take place on August 2nd.

“Ryan Petersen, CEO, will provide an overview of the evolving market for PCIe based SSDs as well as unveil the company's newest enterprise-class PCIe storage solution, the Z-Drive R4,” reads the company's press release.

OCZ has showcased the PCI Express solid state drive for the very first time at Computex 2011, where it demonstrated a server running multiple Z-Drive R4 SSDs connected in a RAID 0 mode, which were able to achieve more than 1 million IOPS in an Iometer 4KB random read test.

From the information presented during the event, we know that the drive will be available in two different versions, called the C Series and the R Series.

The first one of these includes less over provisioning space and lacks any sort of power loss protection, while the latter has more NAND put aside as spare space as well as a series of polymer capacitors, for added data safety.

However, both of these are powered by eight enterprise-class SandForce SF-2281 controllers, which are run in an internal RAID-0 mode, and use a PCI Express x8 interface to communicate with the rest of the system.

Capacities can range from 460GB to 3.84TB for the C-series drives and between 800GB and 3.2TB for R-series SSDs.

Outside of the Z-Drive R4 88, OCZ has also prepared an R4 84 SSD that features a half height form factor, but lags in performance compared with its older brothers. OCZ hasn't mentioned if both of these solutions will be unveiled during the conference call.