OCZ's Z-Drive R4 PCI Express SSDs Promise 2,800MB/s Transfer Speeds

OCZ has been touting the performance of its Z-Drive R4 PCI Express solid state drives ever since the starting days of Computex 2011, and now the time has finally come for the company to release the latest and greatest enterprise SSDs.


The Z-Drive R4 is available in two standard configurations, a half-height version designed for space constrained 1U servers and multi-node rackmount servers, and a full height version.

The half-height version is built using four second-generation SandForce controllers and can deliver between 300GB and 1.2TB of storage space, while the full-height SSDs include eight SF-2000 controllers with a capacity ranging between 800GB AND 3.2TB.

No matter the form factor chosen, the drives use the PCI Express x8 interface, support hardware accelerated 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption, are available with both MLC and SLC memory and feature OCZ's proprietary VCA 2.0 technology.

This was designed specifically for multi-controller SSDs and adds support for a wide range of storage technologies, including TRIM, SCSI Unmap, direct memory access (DMA), complete power fail protection and support for the creation of a virtual pool of logical units (LUNs).

Both the half and full-height Z-Drive R4 PCI Express solid state drives will be available in a C and R version, the latter featuring more over provisioning space and a series of polymer capacitors for providing power loss protection.

"The demand for higher performing PCIe-attached solid state storage continues to grow, and our new Z-Drive R4 represents an increased focus from OCZ to meet the needs of its enterprise and data center clients; it also represents a turning point in the evolution of PCIe SSDs," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group.

"The Z-Drive R4 provides the best of both worlds for storage architects by merging the industry-leading feature-sets of both the pure hardware and pure software based approaches to data management, while maintaining user-configurable flexibility not found in other devices," concluded the company's rep.

OCZ's Z-Drive R4 solid state drives are capable of reaching transfer speeds up to 2800MB/s, while their 4K random write performance is rated at 410,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).

As with all OCZ enterprise products, customer-specific configurations and functionality are available upon request. Pricing for the Z-Drive R4 series SSDs is also available upon request.