Continuing with its PCIe SSD development, OCZ is now showing Z-Drive p88. Sans the mind-boggling speed, it also brings one key feature to the market: NAND Flash redundancy & upgradeability.
From the start of the project, Z-Drive was something like a skunkworks project inside OCZ Technology. We spoke with Tobias Brinkmann and Alex Mei about the state of SSD industry and the positioning of OCZ. Z-Drive was definitely a "learning project" for OCZ after which the company decided to start paying more attention to commercial segment. With the latest iteration, Z-Drive p88, company execs believe they did just that. P88 is nothing like you've seen before in the world of SSD or PCIe-based storage - NAND Flash modules are located on SO-DIMM modules which according to Tobias, brings the upgradeability option to the world of PCIe SSD - and also reduces the power consumption thanks to usage of PCIe x8 slots and standard power regulation. In my personal view, much more important feature is the added redundancy - if something goes off, it is easily to detect a dead NAND Flash chip and upgrade it without a hassle or more importantly - downtime for an investment such as SSD storage.
The proper name of this product should be Omega Drive or Speed Demon, pick yours
The Z-Drive p88 itself comes with four Indilinx controllers and offers a read speed of massive 1.3 GB/s with write speeds also at a massive rate of 1.2GB/s - the fastest we've seen so far. If you are in video production, you're free to start having wet dreams, as this is more than enough to start using uncompressed 4K RAW video and edit the footage at mind-boggling speed.
We look forward to test the Z-Drive p88 inside our own production studio using RED footage. Stay tuned.
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