OCZ Storage Systems, a Toshiba Group Company, announced its new Z-Drive 6000 NVMe PCIe SSD Series. The Z-Drive 6000 Series will offer capacities of 800 GB, 1.6 TB and 3.2 TB in the diminutive 2.5″ form factor on launch, and the 6300 model will expand up to 6.4 TB (8 TB total flash) in Q4 2015. OCZ designed the series to provide top random read speeds of 700,000 IOPS and top random write speed of 160,000 IOPS. Top sequential read speed weighs in at an impressive 2,900 MBps, and sequential speed tops out at a sustained 1,900 MBps.
The Z-Drive 6000 Series consists of two models, the 6000 and the 6300, which are differentiated by use case, endurance and cost. Both drives will come in the 2.5″ form factor and utilize the SFF-8639 connector, though an AIC (Add-In-Card) with an HHHL (Half-Height Half-Length) form factor will be added to the 6300 model in the future. Both SSDs connect via a physical PCIe 3.0 x4 connection and the NVMe 1.1b host interface (certified by the UNH-IOL).
The Z-Drive 6000 is designed to satisfy the requirements of read-centric workloads with an endurance rating of 1 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), and the Z-Drive 6300 will address the mixed-use segment with 3 DWPD.
The 6000 series comes with a 2 million hour MTBF and a 5-year warranty period, and availability is slated for Q2 2015. The SSDs are competitively priced by virtue of OCZ’s direct access to Toshiba NAND, with the Z-Drive 6000 models projected to cost $1.70 per GB and the Z-Drive 6300 at $2.00 per GB.
