OCZ took four of the market’s fastest Solid State Drives, its Vertex drive, installed them on a PCI-Express card together with with a RAID controller and created a storage solution called Z-Drive. Despite the PCI-Express interface OCZ has succeeded in making Z-Drive bootable and reach specified speeds close to 800MB/s and other impressive specifications. Unfortunately the first reviews fails to confirm these numbers.
At HotHardware they compared OCZ’s storage unit to Intel’s X25-M G2 Solid State Drive, both single and RAID configurations. Even if OCZ brings home some victories in the purely synthetic tests, but in the practical tests it gets beaten even by a sole Intel SSD.
OCZ Z-Drive can’t live up to the specification in more than synthetic specifications and its at big file transfer the drive really shines. Most likely the problems is related to the Solid State Technology cooperating with the LSI RAID controller, something that will hopefully improve with future firmware updates.
Until then the hunt for the ultimate system drive continues.
:: OCZ Z-Drive m84 PCI-Express SSD Review
