OCZ Z-Drive R3

OCZ also demonstrated the new Z-Drive R3, a PCIe SSD with four SF-1500 controllers behind a Marvell RAID controller. The end result is the performance of four SandForce SSDs in RAID-0 on a single half-height PCIe card:

OCZ ran a quick run of ATTO on the Z-Drive R3 at the show, showing peak reads/writes of 1GB/s.

New 3.5” Chassis

OCZ also demonstrated a new, slimmer chassis for its 3.5” SSDs like the Vertex 2 and Agility 2:

 

On the other end of the spectrum, OCZ presented an even bigger (physically) drive: the IBIS XL. Now this isn’t going to be productized, but it’s simply something to test the waters with. The IBIS XL fits into a standard 5.25” drive by and starts at 4TB. 

Speaking of IBIS, OCZ plans to bring an optical version of the IBIS’ HSDL interface to the market. OCZ didn’t have a live demo of optical HSDL, but here’s a shot of an optical HSDL card:

Unfortunately OCZ has yet to convince any motherboard makers to implement HSDL ports on boards, so at this point the standard continues to be quite limited.

OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro
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  • jrocks84 - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link

    Is the 25nm NAND from IMFT going to be DDR NAND?
  • Chinoman - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link

    Wouldn't anyone else like to see RAID 0 with TRIM support?
  • CharonPDX - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    If the drive has good garbage collection in its own firmware, it doesn't need TRIM support.
  • crimson117 - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    Garbage Collection is better than nothing, but never quite as good as TRIM.
  • kb9fcc - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    Not needing either would be best.
  • Taft12 - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    Citation?

    I'd be especially interested in seeing your statement backed up with regards to this hardware that isn't even released yet!
  • sprockkets - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    Garbage collection works better when it knows what garbage to collect, hence TRIM.
  • GullLars - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    Garbage Collection and TRIM are not mutualy exclusive, and are both ways of maintaining write performance. If you don't have any GC at all working with write placement algorithms, you end up with something like early JMicron devices.

    TRIM simply allows the drive to not have false-valid data, meaning it can mark blocks as dirty and have them included in the GC instead of moved around.
    This can significantly lower write amplification, and is more important the less unpartitioned space you have, as it allowes a second pool of dynamic freespace for GC to work with.

    BTW, i'm running 4R0 C300 and get about 1150MB/s read on SB850 with ATTO, and about 100k random IOPS. I don't think Z-drive R3 can beat that, compressible data or not.
    I also found 4x was overkill, 3x will get you past 1GB/s and 100k IOPS.
  • glugglug - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link

    Garbage collection and TRIM are totally unrelated. No matter how good your garbage collection is, it absolutely does not overlap with or remove the benefit of TRIM.
  • bcronce - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link

    I wouldn't say "totally unrelated". TRIM augments the GC.

    TRIM does nothing more than flag blocks for the GC to clean up which reduces the amount of "guessing" the GC has to do.

    Less guessing = better

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