Toshiba purchased OCZ last month for $35 million after OCZ were bankrupt.  OCZ are starting shipments of a new line of solid-state drives (SSD’s), which offer a maximum storage capacity of 3.2TB.  The Z-Drive 4500 range of Solid State Drives ship in capacities of 800GB and 1.6TB.  The new SSD’s are manufactured using the Japanese company’s latest developing process.

OCZ does already offer 3.2TB drives with the Z-Drive R4 SSD range, but the new drives are quicker, OCZ said in a statement. You may want to break into your savings account if you plan to purchase one though as the 3.2TB drive is priced at $6,533, the 1.6TB at $3,806 and 800GB at $2,355. This SSD range offers endurance of 2.5PB and random read times of 252,000 IOPS and random write times of up to 76,000 IOPS.
The Z-Drive 4500 SSD connects through a PCI-Express slot.  The SSD also uses software as a tool to increase the speed of read/write operations.  OCZ is also bundling Windows Accelerator software, which manages the SSD storage when it is functioning as cache. Other software bundled with the SSD is OCZ’s VXL virtualization software that manages deployment of virtual machines across blocks in SSD arrays.  This process minimizes resource waste. The virtualization software ensures quicker deployments of Virtual Machines and faster read/ write times.

At 3.2TB, OCZ are offering the maximum storage capacity available in Solid State Drive. SSD’s are quickly catching up to optical drives, which have reached a maximum capacity of 6TB. SSD’s, however, still remain more expensive to produce and purchase, than hard drives do.
Scott Harlin, director of marketing communications for enterprise at OCZ, said, OCZ will continue to offer its own line of SSD’s and nothing has been affected by Toshiba’s acquisition of the firm.  “Toshiba will continue to develop, produce, and market their own line of Toshiba-branded SSD’s while we will focus on developing, producing and marketing OCZ-branded SSD’s that leverage our in-house technology.”
OCZ’s SSD’s are what is known as MLC (multi-level cell), in which multiple bits are stored into one cell. The drive is also equipped with security and it has features to protect data in case of a power surge/outage. It is interesting to note that the drivers for the SSD for Windows and Linux have been rebuilt from the ground up. Also OCZ is offering a five-year warranty with the new products, which should quash any worries which people have regarding the reliability of OCZ drives.