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 1.4Gbit/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.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.