OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (RM1616) Features Sixteen SandForce Controllers

The Z-Drive R4 is a PCIe SSD available in 4 and 8-controller versions targeted squarely at the enterprise. Apparently some of OCZ's customers wanted an even beefier version, which OCZ has delivered in the form of the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (RM1616). Featuring sixteen SandForce SF-2582 controllers, the RM1616 supports up to 16TB of NAND on a single, double slot, PCIe card. The interface remains PCIe x8 although the connector is physically a x16 interface.

The RM1616 is organized into two 8-controller sets, each behind an OCZ VCA chip. 

Gallery: OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (RM1616) Features Sixteen SandForce Controllers

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Computex 2011: SuperTalent Introduces SandForce Powered USB3 Stick

The very first enthusiast SSDs had their roots in USB drives. Memory vendors that were making USB sticks thought to put a bunch of NAND in parallel behind a rudimentary NAND to SATA controller and you had an SSD. Performance characteristics looked great on paper but of course there were teething problems.

These days the reverse has happened. High end USB sticks now look a lot like small SSDs. USB 3.0 SSDs were either too bulky to carry around or weren't that impressive from a performance standpoint, but SuperTalent just showed me one that is quite tempting. This is the SuperTalent USB 3.0 Express RC8, it's a USB stick that has a SF-1222 controller just like the previous generation of high end SSDs:

With four NAND devices on board, the RC8 actually has 8-channels feeding two die per package. Two channels are routed to each device, hence the use of BGA NAND vs. TSOP. SuperTalent uses 25nm IMFT NAND for the drive.  Performance as a result is quite impressive. Over USB 2.0 you're looking at a maximum of around 40MB/s, but over USB 3.0 you can hit 200MB/s with highly compressible data:

Worst case performance for incompressible sequential writes over USB 3.0 is still only 32MB/s thanks to the one-die-per-channel architecture (as well as inherent SF limitations). Read speed is still excellent however at nearly 180MB/s.

The performance characteristics make this drive less ideal for copying large compressed videos to, but great for general use. In fact, running/installing applications or even running a full OS environment from the drive is likely a pretty good experience. SuperTalent will offer the RC8 in 25GB, 50GB and 100GB capacities (with 32GB, 64GB and 128GB of NAND on board).  Expect availability starting late this month and pricing to be inline with standard SF-1222 based SSDs (~$110 for the 50GB drive). {gallery 1130}]]>

Kingston's HyperX SandForce SSD

Kingston is a pretty big player in the SSD space but mostly on the mainstream/value end of the spectrum. With a fairly conservative strategy we haven't seen Kingston be competitive with higher end drives since the release of the X25-M. That's all about to change now that Kingston is officially a SandForce partner.

 

The Kingston HyperX SSD uses Intel 25nm NAND and a SF-2281 controller, making it very similar to a Vertex 3 (it's unclear if it'll have the same performance-limited firmware as the OWC drive we tested). The drive will come with a 3-year warranty and be available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. As always, Kingston will offer the drive as a part of an optional upgrade kit which includes a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, external USB enclosure, Acronis imaging software, SATA cable and a screwdriver. {gallery 1103}]]>

Computex 2011: SuperTalent Introduces SandForce Powered USB3 Stick

The very first enthusiast SSDs had their roots in USB drives. Memory vendors that were making USB sticks thought to put a bunch of NAND in parallel behind a rudimentary NAND to SATA controller and you had an SSD. Performance characteristics looked great on paper but of course there were teething problems.

These days the reverse has happened. High end USB sticks now look a lot like small SSDs. USB 3.0 SSDs were either too bulky to carry around or weren't that impressive from a performance standpoint, but SuperTalent just showed me one that is quite tempting. This is the SuperTalent USB 3.0 Express RC8, it's a USB stick that has a SF-1222 controller just like the previous generation of high end SSDs:

With four NAND devices on board, the RC8 actually has 8-channels feeding two die per package. Two channels are routed to each device, hence the use of BGA NAND vs. TSOP. SuperTalent uses 25nm IMFT NAND for the drive.  Performance as a result is quite impressive. Over USB 2.0 you're looking at a maximum of around 40MB/s, but over USB 3.0 you can hit 200MB/s with highly compressible data:

Worst case performance for incompressible sequential writes over USB 3.0 is still only 32MB/s thanks to the one-die-per-channel architecture (as well as inherent SF limitations). Read speed is still excellent however at nearly 180MB/s.

The performance characteristics make this drive less ideal for copying large compressed videos to, but great for general use. In fact, running/installing applications or even running a full OS environment from the drive is likely a pretty good experience. SuperTalent will offer the RC8 in 25GB, 50GB and 100GB capacities (with 32GB, 64GB and 128GB of NAND on board).  Expect availability starting late this month and pricing to be inline with standard SF-1222 based SSDs (~$110 for the 50GB drive). {gallery 1130}]]>

Kingston's HyperX SandForce SSD

Kingston is a pretty big player in the SSD space but mostly on the mainstream/value end of the spectrum. With a fairly conservative strategy we haven't seen Kingston be competitive with higher end drives since the release of the X25-M. That's all about to change now that Kingston is officially a SandForce partner.

 

The Kingston HyperX SSD uses Intel 25nm NAND and a SF-2281 controller, making it very similar to a Vertex 3 (it's unclear if it'll have the same performance-limited firmware as the OWC drive we tested). The drive will come with a 3-year warranty and be available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. As always, Kingston will offer the drive as a part of an optional upgrade kit which includes a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, external USB enclosure, Acronis imaging software, SATA cable and a screwdriver. {gallery 1103}]]>

Z68 SSD Caching with Corsair's F40 SandForce SSD

I have to admit that Intel's Z68 launch was somewhat anti-climactic for me. It was the chipset we all wanted when Sandy Bridge first arrived, but now four months after Sandy Bridge showed up there isn't all that much to be excited about - save for one feature of course: Smart Response Technology (aka SSD caching). The premise is borrowed from how SSDs are sometimes used in the enterprise space: put a small, fast SSD in front of a large array of storage and use it to cache both reads and writes. This is ultimately how the memory hierarchy works - hide the latency of larger, cheaper storage by caching frequently used data in much faster, but more expensive storage.

I believe there's a real future with SSD caching, however the technology needs to go mainstream. It needs to be available on all chipsets, something we won't see until next year with Ivy Bridge. Even then, there's another hurdle: the price of the SSD cache.

For $110 today you can either get a 20GB Larson Creek drive from Intel, or a 40GB SF-1200 based SSD from Corsair. Given how well SandForce's SSDs perform on their own, I wondered how one would stack up as a SSD cache. Read on to find out!

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OCZ'z Vertex Pro 3 Demo: World's First SandForce SF-2000

A few months ago SandForce announced its second generation SSD controller: the SF-2000 series. The specs SandForce released at the time were almost too good to be true. As a refresher here’s what we saw back in October of last year:

SandForce is promising a single enterprise level drive that can deliver 500MB/s sequential reads and writes (for highly compressible data), and up to 60K IOPS for 4KB random reads and writes. That’s not an evolutionary improvement, that’s more than a doubling of what most of the competition can do today. Even compared to existing SandForce drives it’s a huge increase in performance. But as I’ve heard many times before, anyone can put out a promising PDF.

Read on to find out if OCZ's beta Vertex 3 Pro can live up to the expectations.

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