OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company, displayed several of its latest SSD designs at Computex 2015. The Z-Drive 6000 Series is OCZ’s inaugural enterprise NVMe SSD offering, and we have more detailed coverage here. We also awarded the Z-Drive 6000 the Tom’s Hardware Best Of Show award for Computex 2015.
We put an early engineering sample of the Z-Drive 6000 through our own tests prior to Computex 2015, and the Z-Drive has been certified as NVMe 1.1b-compliant in the UNH-IOL’s (University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory) interoperability and conformance testing.
The Z-Drive 6000 will initially be available in capacities of 800 GB, 1.5 TB and 3.2 TB in Q2 2015. The SSDs will come in the 2.5″ form factor and feature top 4K random read/write speeds of 700,000/160,000 IOPS. The SSD also sports sequential read/write speeds of 2,900/1,900 MBps through its PCIe 3.0 x4 connection (via the SFF-8639 connector), and provides up to 1 DWPD of endurance during the five-year warranty period.
OCZ displayed the the Z-Drive 6300 for the first time at Computex 2015. The Z-Drive 6300 offers up to 3 DWPD of endurance, but also includes a HHHL (Half Height Half Length) AIC in addition to the 2.5″ model. The 6300 comes in capacities of 800 GB, 1.5 TB and 3.2 TB in Q2 2015, and capacity will rise to 6.4 TB in Q4 of 2015. This variant tops out at 2,900/1,400 MB/s sequential read/write and 700,000/120,000 random read/write IOPS.
The bottom of the card reveals the Toshiba A19 nm eMLC that provides the higher endurance rating for the 6300 model. The lower-endurance 6000 model utilizes typical Toshiba A19nm MLC.
The move to more dense architectures will rely heavily upon m.2 SSDs, and SSD vendors are working to provide slim SSDs with standard enterprise-class features. OCZ is currently utilizing PMC-Sierra Princeton NVMe controllers for its Z-Drive 6000 Series, but it also has its own homegrown JetExpress controller program underway, as evidenced by the JD-JX Series.
The JD-JX Series offers full power-loss protection on a 22 x 110 mm PCB and utilizes OCZ’s homegrown NVMe JetExpress controller. The JD-JX provides up to 3 DWPD of endurance and comes in capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB. The company indicated the device is capable of 1,600 MB/s and 300,000 IOPS but didn’t specify the type of workloads, so it is safe to assume that these are read performance specifications. OCZ hasn’t released detailed performance specifications as of yet, which likely indicates the product is further out on OCZ’s roadmap.
It’s clear that OCZ’s path forward for high-performance enterprise products will focus on NVMe SSDs, but the company also has SATA offerings as well. Stay tuned for a full competitive performance analysis of the Z-Drive 6000 Series when the product comes closer to market.
