OCZ Z-Drive m84 PCI-Express SSD Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, October 19, 2009, 11:55 AM EDT

An interesting thing about NAND Flash SSD (Solid State Drive) technologies, beyond the fact that the market is flush with competitive product offerings, is that the technology itself is very flexible and adaptable to a number of different design approaches, other just the straight-forward SATA-based SSDs. Take for example the RAID 4-pack configuration we setup here with Intel's X25-M SSD or perhaps the omnipotent Fusion-io ioDrive. Granted, these are rather high-end, pricey setups, but you get the gist that solid state storage arena is just getting warmed up.

In a sort of hybrid version of Fusion-io's product and our little RAID 4-pack array we setup for testing, memory solutions manufacturer OCZ Technology has introduced an almost fully integrated solution of their SATA-based SSD technology, along with a third party RAID controller, all wrapped up clean and tidy on a standard plug and play (no longer pray) PCI Express X8 adapter card. Dubbed the Z-Drive, we first got a look at this wild-eyed beast back in May. It wasn't quite ready for prime time back then and it re-emerged again in early September with specs that admittedly caused a pavlovian response of our salivary glands.

Today, we get to satiate ourselves with a deep dive look at the new OCZ Z-Drive, in a tasty 256GB variant that drops in at an almost reasonable $899 price point that is on near cost parity with a standard mid-range SSD. This is a very different approach to SSD technology, one that occupies a PCI Express slot instead of a SATA port. First we'll dig into what makes it tick and then we'll see how it ticks through our benchmark time trials.

OCZ Z-Drive m84 PCI-Express SSD Review

Tags: SSD, OCZ, Storage, Z-Drive, PCI Express

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com