Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSDs from OCZ Going Official

Although providing a first glimpse at their Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSDs back at CES 2011, OCZ has decided to finally make these high-end, ultra-fast, enterprise-oriented storage solutions official, catering to the needs of system architects looking for performance, reliability, and design flexibility, as well as a compact footprint for server applications.

The Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express series, available in SLC, MLC, eMLC NAND flash in 150GB, 300GB, 600GB, and 1.2TB capacities, as well as a half-height and half-length form factor, offers a host of useful features for enterprise applications, including here TRIM, SMART monitoring, native command queuing (NCQ), tagged command queuing (TCQ), power fail management, and wear-leveling.

Moreover, according to OCZ, the new line includes the first storage products to deploy the company's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology, that joins together the resources provided by two or more NAND flash controller interfaces, MCPs, storage processors, and a physical interface.

“The Z-Drive R3 lineup of PCI-E SSD’s delivers superior performance and flexibility to enterprise clients who require high bandwidth coupled with high transactional performance,” commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.

“Clients gain both the benefits of increased performance and reduced size with the Z-Drive R3, the half height and half length card can fit in even the slimmest servers and yet is capable of delivering up to 135k IOPS in a half height and 250k 4K Random write IOPS, in a full height configuration, due to OCZ’s unique Virtualized Controller Architecture,” OCZ's CEO continued.

“This innovative new technology will provide customers with robust enterprise features including TRIM, SMART monitoring and power fail management all within a single streamlined solution,” Mr. Petersen concluded.

Unfortunately, pricing for the new PCI Express SSDs has not yet been provided, but taking into account their impressive level of performance, we're pretty sure that they'll be pretty expensive.