OCZ Technology Group announced today its move into mass production with the fourth generation of PCIe-based solid state drives, the new Z-Drive R2 SSD series. This will actually be the second rendition of the original Z-Drive drives, adding "greater performance and design flexibility" thanks to optimized, interchangeable NAND modules--this will allow for in-field service and upgrades without the need to rip out the existing drive.
“The Z-Drive R2 is a total solution that delivers exceptional performance over a wide of range of applications due to its superior sequential performance, making it a winner in both high IOP and high-throughput environments," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group.
As with the previous Z-Drive, the R2 version is bootable, and offers a huge performance value with teamed up with other Z-Drive R2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Storage capacities range from 256GB to 2TB, however the company said that--despite price--the PCIe-based SSDs provide an actual cost savings when compared to the expense of maintaining complex HDD infrastructures.
Currently OCZ is offering three models: the Z-Drive R2 p88, the Z-Drive R2 p84, and the Z-Drive R2 m84. The R2 p88 version is the fastest drive of the bunch, offering read speeds of up to 1.3GB/s, write speeds of up to 1GB/s, and a sustained write speed of up to 550MB/s. For more information on all three models, head here.