OCZ'z Vertex 3 Pro Demo: World's First SandForce SF-2000
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2011 9:37 PM ESTOCZ Z-Drive R3
OCZ also demonstrated the new Z-Drive R3, a PCIe SSD with four SF-1500 controllers behind a Marvell RAID controller. The end result is the performance of four SandForce SSDs in RAID-0 on a single half-height PCIe card:
OCZ ran a quick run of ATTO on the Z-Drive R3 at the show, showing peak reads/writes of 1GB/s.
New 3.5” Chassis
OCZ also demonstrated a new, slimmer chassis for its 3.5” SSDs like the Vertex 2 and Agility 2:
On the other end of the spectrum, OCZ presented an even bigger (physically) drive: the IBIS XL. Now this isn’t going to be productized, but it’s simply something to test the waters with. The IBIS XL fits into a standard 5.25” drive by and starts at 4TB.
Speaking of IBIS, OCZ plans to bring an optical version of the IBIS’ HSDL interface to the market. OCZ didn’t have a live demo of optical HSDL, but here’s a shot of an optical HSDL card:
Unfortunately OCZ has yet to convince any motherboard makers to implement HSDL ports on boards, so at this point the standard continues to be quite limited.
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goozira - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
With the IBIS XL 5.25" drive, what connection ports are on the back and is the box completely enclosed? I'm wondering if OCZ made the unit upgradeable with slide-out PCB slots or would you have to buy different levels of storage like the Z-Drive.ckryan - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
I wonder if the next gen SF drives will be the next step in performance. Moving from an Agility or Vertex to a Agility 2/Vertex 2 isn't that big a step... certainly not the giant leap moving from a mechanical drive to a SSD was. I wonder if moving from a 2g Intel or Idilinx drive to a nextgen SF drive will seem like that large of a leap in tangible performance. Getting that kind of performance leap is addictive, and why I replaced the drives in my desktop and laptop with SSDs to begin with. Upgrading from SSD to a marginally faster SSD doesn't make much sense, but it certainly seems like the next generation of SF's may have the leap in performance to make the upgrade worth while.cactusdog - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
No doubt these are going to be much more expensive too but unless you move around a lot of 4GB+ files it probably wont be very noticeable with normal computer use over a fast sata 2 ssd.vol7ron - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
- "No doubt these are going to be much more expensive too"Maybe market prices. The NAND should be cheaper, it's the controller that's driving the price. I'm not sure if the SF-2K controllers will be all that much more than the 1500s were when they were released. If what the article posted is true, this is the best controller, so it certainly will be expensive. I'm curious how the lower (cheaper) SF-2K controllers fair in performance.
- "it probably wont be very noticeable with normal computer use over a fast sata 2 ssd."
Maybe, maybe not. I still notice a slowdown with Intel G2 during startup, just because of the massive amounts of startup apps and widgets that now exist.
With more screen real estate (those that have large/multiple monitors), you have more space to want to fill, and thus a larger demand on your hardware resources.
Though, I still have my anti-virus/games on a mechanical drive to increase the longevity of the SSD. I'm waiting for that $/GiB ratio to go down before thinking about putting them on SSDs.
Out of Box Experience - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link
Can a single Vertex 3 copy and paste 4GB files faster than a modern 7200 RPM Western Digital?This could be interesting..
A modern Western Digital desktop drive is 3 times faster than a Vertex 2 at copying and pasting data but a vertex 3 isnt 3 X faster than a Vertex 2 so its still probably slower than a Western Digital at copy/paste functions..
You know, REALWORLD functions!
MrSpadge - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
The faster storage becomes, the more of a bottleneck the rest becomes. If your CPU is already at 100% there's only so much an even faster SSD can do. So don't expect another huge jump, but rather solid improvements.MrS
RussianSensation - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Looks like SATA 3.0 is going to be obsolete by the time Vertex 4 rolls around. Unbelievable. I might just have to bite the bullet and finally grab an SSD drive, which of course means I have to dump my 1.5 year old S1156 platform with its by now archaic SATA 2.0 interface !probedb - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Just buy a SATA 3.0 PCIe card :)therealnickdanger - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Or avoid the whole mess and buy a Revo and get superior IO.Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Can you boot off a SATA 3 PCIe card? I mean without jumping through 17 hoops.