OCZ Technology Group Inc. announced plans today to begin mass producing its PCI-Express (PCIe) Z-Drive R2 Solid State Drive (SSD) series , the second iteration of the product.
The Z-Drive R2, aimed at use in storage area networks (SAN), workstations, and servers, almost doubles the performance over its predecessor because of the implementation of a series of optimized NAND modules, the company said.
"Our 4th generation PCIe SSD, the Z-Drive R2, tackles the performance challenges facing enterprise IT professionals head-on" Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ, said in a statement.
Peterson said the Z-Drive R2 delivers superior sequential read/write performance using eight PCIe I/O lanes. "In addition, it is the only bootable and field serviceable PCIe SSD option on the market today," Petersen said.
The Z-Drive R2 offers data transfer rates of up to 1.4GB/sec and comes in capacities ranging from 256GB to 2TB. The first-generation Z-Drive also had 8 PCIe lanes but each had 500MB/sec throughput for a total data throughput speed of up to 800MB/sec on the drive.
OCZ said the new R2 drive is bootable and takes the serial-ATA (SATA) bottleneck out of the I/O equation by not only employing the high-speed PCIe architecture but a compact enterprise-grade RAID array. The drive has an internal four-way RAID 0 configuration to increase performance.
The R2 series also comes with interchangeable NAND flash modules in the place of permanent, surface-mounted NAND, which allows administrators to services the drive in the field, as well as upgrade it.