OCZ Comes Roaring Back with NVMe SSD Debut

The OCZ Z-Drive 6000It’s really something to see a company recover from a big challenge, and signs of that happened this week with OCZ’s introduction of a new NVMe-based PCIe SSD they call the Z-Drive 6000 series.

This replacement for the company’s Z-Drive 4000 series is a complete redesign with an obsession for performance.  OCZ tells me that they moved from a 2-hop design to a 1-hop by using the PMC Princeton PCIe SSD controller, and have passed the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Labs’ compliance tests to NVMe 1.1B compliance.

But how does it perform?  Well the 1-hop design helps reduce latency (which is just starting to overshadow IOPS in users’ minds) and the latency of this SSD is significantly lower than competing NVMe SSDs: between 25-30μs, figures that OCZ tells me are very consistent, a big plus for enterprise applications.  As for IOPS, the device can perform under a 70/30 Read/Write load at 330K.

The 6000 series is provided in both standard MLC and eMLC for those who want the security of eMLC and are willing to sacrifice a little performance to sleep better at night.

This product is a good fit for the market needs, and shows how devoted OCZ and its parent Toshiba are to providing high performance in the SSD marketplace.