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#OCZ VERTEX 3 FIRMWARE 2.02 DRIVER#
The driver accumulates IOs and redestributes them to the drive's controller array, to some degree, dynamically. Details are still vague but OCZ claims to have written its own driver and firmware for the Marvell SAS controller on the Z-Drive R4 that allows it to manage redirection of IOs based on current controller queue depths rather than a dumb RAID-stripe. OCZ continues to use its VCA 2.0 architecture on the Z-Drive R4. It's OCZ branded but this is a Marvell SAS controller - the same driver works on the RevoDrive 3 X2 and the Z-Drive R4 This is clearly a solution for a rack mounted server. Thanks to the eight SF-2282 controllers and tons of NAND in close proximity, OCZ requires 100 CFM of air to properly cool the Z-Drive R4. Roughly 27% of the NAND is set aside as spare area, exposing 1490GiB to the OS. A single 300mm wafer only has a surface area of 70685mm 2 (even less is usable), which means it takes more than half of a 300mm 25nm MLC NAND wafer to supply the flash for just one of these drives. Remember each 8GB MLC NAND die (25nm) is 167mm 2, which means this Z-Drive R2mm 2 of 25nm silicon on-board. This is an absolutely insane amount of NAND for a single drive. Each NAND device has two 8GB die inside, which works out to be 2048GB of NAND on-board. Each PCB is home to four SF-2282 controllers and 64 Intel 25nm MLC NAND devices (8 controllers, 128 devices total). OCZ typically sells SF-2281 based SSDs at around $2/GB, even accounting for the extra controllers on-board there should be a hefty amount of profit for OCZ in the selling price of these Z-drives.Īs with the RevoDrive X2 models the Z-Drive R4 CM88 uses two PCBs to accommodate all of its controllers.
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Doing the math that works out to be anywhere between $9600 - $11200 for this single SSD. OCZ expects pricing on this board to be somewhere in the $6 - $7/GB range depending on configuration. OCZ tells us these problems will be addressed in the final version of the drives due to ship in the coming weeks. We have a preproduction board that has a number of stability & compatibility issues. The table above simply highlights the standard configurations OCZ builds.įor today's review OCZ sent us a 1.6TB Z-Drive R4 CM88. The C-series boards do not have this feature.ĭespite the spec table above, OCZ also offers customized solutions as I mentioned above. The R-series boards have an array of capacitors that can store enough charge to flush all pending writes to the NAND arrays in the event of a power failure. The main difference there is the support for power failure protection. The C-series use SF-2282 controllers while the R-series use SF-2582.
#OCZ VERTEX 3 FIRMWARE 2.02 FULL#
The xM84s are half height solutions with four controllers while the xM88s are full height with eight controllers. The Z-Drive R4 is a multi-controller PCIe solution that uses either 4 or 8 SF-2000 controllers behind a SAS-to-PCIe 2.0 x8 controller. We introduced the Z-Drive R4 in our Computex coverage earlier this year - it's a beast. The RevoDrive family of PCIe SSDs were targeted at the high-end desktop or workstation market, but for an enterprise-specific solution OCZ has its Z-Drive line. You may not always have a ton of 2.5" drive bays but there's usually at least one high-bandwidth PCIe slot unused. In the enterprise segment where 1U and 2U servers are common, PCI Express SSDs are very attractive. If you want an SF-2000 drive with SAS support and SLC NAND, OCZ will build it for you. OCZ's enterprise drives are fully customizable down to the controller, firmware and NAND type on-board. Today you can custom order an OCZ Deneva 2 SSD which is an enterprise focused SF-2000 based solution. OCZ has quietly addressed the enterprise SSD space for a while now. What is a public SSD manufacturer like OCZ to do? Go after the enterprise market of course. Investors don't care about good product, they care about good returns. Public companies are under an even greater pressure to maintain high profit margins. There are other effects, such as insufficient validation testing that result from this price crunch. The shrinking margins in the consumer SSD space will ultimately drive companies out of the business, consolidating power in those companies who are fine operating with slim margins. There's a downward trend in NAND and SSD pricing, which unfortunately squeezes drive manufacturers as they compete for marketshare. In our last SandForce SSD roundup I talked about how undesirable the consumer SSD market is, at least for those companies who don't produce their own controllers and/or NAND.