OCZ recently discontinued producing memory kits which came as a great shock to many as they were a popular brand to invest in. Their Gold and Platinum series were particular favourites within the community due to great performance/price ratio. Our trip to CeBIT this year revealed in one way or other why OCZ has broken away from the memory market and why OCZ are keen to concentrate on their storage and PSU solutions. OCZ are market leaders for SSD solutions, their new RevoDrive X2, Vortex 3 and Z-Drives offer blistering performance that no other brand can claim to have ready at consumers finger-tips and so it is that our trip revealed some fantastic new products on the horizon for OCZ, some of which are/will soon be in our test labs here at Vortez.

RevoDrive X2

The RevoDrive is a innovative piece of kit. Instead of using the SATA port, (typically SATA II which operates at 3Gbpps) the RevoDrive uses the PCIe x4 interface - completely bypassing the inferior speeds of the SATA port and channelling into superior speeds of over 740MB/s for read and write transfer rates. It's unlike anything currently on the market and is a must for those wanting the fastest solution currently available.

The RevoDrive X2 in particular uses onboard RAID 0 and features 4 x SandForce-1200 controllers to significantly boost data access and bandwidth. It would be frightening just thinking about how fast this would be for a boot drive!!

Available in 100GB-960GB the RevoDrive X2 is available to buy now and is actually in our grasp as this article is being written. A full review will published soon on Vortez.net.



Z-Drive R3

The Z Drive is once again a PCIe SSD solution that eliminates the usage of the inferior performance provided by the SATA port. The R3 is really designed for enterprise solutions due to its sheer power - which comes at a heavy price-tag for desktop consumers. Depending on the model, users can take advantage of up to 1.8GB/s for read/write transfer rates which is quite honestly phenomenal. If you thought the RevoDrive was rapid then you ought to check out one of these drives. Over a traditional SATA II SSD you are looking at between 700-800% speed increase!!

A Z-Drive can handle intensive workload and reduce the possibility of failure throughout operations. It comes with the numerous features that provide loss of data protection, encryption and ECC protection. For enterprise users this is the ultimate storage solution to replace SATA/SAS alternatives.

When the price falls and demand is there, you can count on the Z-Drive being a classic option to go with. OCZ had the RM84 configured on a demo system to display the blistering transmission speeds available against an OCZ Vertex 2 (SATA II). Check out the ATTO benchmark below, notice how the read and write transfer rates are almost neck and neck. Performance given by the Z-Drive is unlike anything. OCZ have clearly shown us that they are market leaders in the SSD storage domain and will be here for the long run.

OCZ were also showing their Vertex 3 (SATA 6G) SSDs - this drive is on its way and will be reviewed shortly too