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.