Just How Fast is OCZ's New 1 TB SSD?
It's been barely a day since we first brought you the news of OCZ's massive 1 TB solid-state drive. In case you missed it, here's a quick rundown: Dubbed the Z Drive, this powerful, videocard-like device hooks into your PCI Express x8 slot to deliver the punishing performance of a RAID 0 array of four, 256 GB solid-state drives. But that's not all.
The Z Drive also sports a hardware RAID controller and 256 MB of onboard cache. This helps the device allegedly achieve read and write speeds of 600 MB/sec. and 500 MB/sec. respectively. Or, at least, that's what OCZ's been boasting about its new $1,500 device. Belgian Web site Madshrimps was able to get its hands on a Z Drive for a little bit of benchmarking action and here's what they were able to find.
First off, the specs: The Z Drive was hooked onto an Asus P6T motherboard running an Intel Core i7 965 processor, running alongside 6 GB of OCZ DDR3 2000 MHz RAM. The Windows Vista 64-bit operating system was loaded onto a 150 GB Western Digital Raptor drive.
Next, the benchmarks: Madshrimps fired up HD Tune Pro 3.10 and was able to coax the Z Drive into delivering 100 MB/se.c read and write speeds when using smaller file lengths of around 4K for the testing. As they increased the file lengths on the benchmark, the Z Drive's transfer rates shot up to appoximately 1,400 MB/sec. read and 1,100 MB/sec .writes. That's a crazy amount for a synthetic benchmark, but what about performance results that are more indicative of real-world use?
Madshrimps fired up SiSoft Sandra File system and found that the Z Drive outputted a drive index of around 550 MB/sec. This blew away competing scores from Gigabyte's i-RAM drive, as well as the scores of any conventional drive or RAID of drives based on spinning platters (go figure). In the final tested benchmark, PCMark Vantage, the Z Drive outputted scores of more than 125 MB/sec. for all its hard drive tests. At the top of the scale, the Z Drive capped out at a speed of 507 MB/sec. on the application's Windows Media Center test. The Z Drive achieved an overall PCMark score of more than 43,000 points--that's downright fast, even without any other point of comparison on the tested PC.
If you want to check out the full results, as well as pictures Madshrimps shot of its testing, just head on over to the Belgian site. And if you want to pick up a Z Drive of your very own, take a seat. There's no word on availability or final pricing for the drive/device/array/beast.
Spinning platters HDD will be obsolete soon,it was about the time for platter HDD to say goodbye, I got tired of them, they served well, rest in peace.
That was so that they have validity! It's much easier to Photoshop a screen cap than an actual pic of the screen. And even if the pic of the LCD is edited it can be found with a bit of work.
Is there an edit button hiding somewhere I don't see?
Eehhh.. in that case, why then not photoshop a screen cap and take a picture of it being displayed on the LCD. Duh.
I hope they come out with a small (4x32=128gb would be awesome), bootable, PCI-e 16x 2.0 (8 gb/s max transfer), and inexpensive Z-drive.
Although I might wait for the SLC version because it's nothing more than a RAID and 4 drives.
It's RAID 0.
RAID 0 just stripes information across multiple drives. RAID 1 mirrors it across all the drives in the setup. RAID 5 has what's called parity, while the capacity of a single drive is taken (so in a 4 drive setup, it will only have the capacity of 3 drives), if a single drive fails in the setup up, it can be quickly replaced, and automatically rebuilt.
So RAID 0 isn't really RAID (which is why the '0' makes sense).
Now they need to start working out faster controllers with better connections to the rest of the system. Poor hdd controllers have been stuck in slower southbridge chips which will either need to be made faster or they'll have to bring more functionality to the northbridge
Lol, and how hard would it be to take a screen cap, edit it, display it, then take a picture of the LCD? You don't have to mess with the image of the LCD.