OCZ Introduces Z-Drive 6000 Enterprise PCIe SSD Series with NVMe Support
by Kristian Vättö on May 20, 2015 8:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Enterprise SSDs
- NVMe
- Z-Drive 6000
Back at CES OCZ teased us by showcasing the Z-Drive 6000, but the drive was still under development, so the details were rather scarce. Today OCZ is finally lifting the curtain and making a formal announcement of the Z-Drive 6000 series, the company's first NVMe compliant SSD.
We've talked about NVMe in the past, but in short it's a software/driver stack that replaces the ancient AHCI. NVMe has been designed for SSDs from the ground up and its main benefits are scalability (up to 64,000 outstanding commands versus 32 in AHCI) and streamlined software stack that reduces both latency and CPU overhead for higher and more efficient performance. The Z-Drive 6000 series supports the native Windows (8.1 & Server 2012 R2), Linux, UNIX, Solaris, and VMware NVMe drivers, although OCZ will also have custom NVMe drivers for Windows, Linux, and VMware for drive management reasons. The current native drivers lack some necessary management features (e.g. I still haven't found a way to secure erase an NVMe drive with the in-box drivers), so in order to have the features available at launch OCZ is offering a custom driver. That said, OCZ is fully invested in improving the native open source drivers, but the problem is the long turnaround time for updates that has created the need for vendor-specific drivers.
OCZ Z-Drive 6000 Series Specifications | ||
6000 | 6300 | |
Capacities | 800GB; 1,600GB & 3,200GB | |
Form Factors | 2.5" 15mm (SFF-8639) | 2.5" 15mm & HHHL AIC |
Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 (NVMe 1.1b) | |
Controller | PMC-Sierra "Princeton" | |
NAND | Toshiba A19nm 128Gbit MLC | Toshiba A19nm 128Gbit eMLC |
Endurance | 1 DWPD | 3 DWPD |
Encryption | AES-256 | |
Power Loss Protection | Yes | Yes |
Warranty | Five Years | |
Price | ~$1.70/GB | ~$2.00/GB |
The Z-Drive 6000 series comes in two flavors: 6000 and 6300. The underlying controller and firmware architectures are the same in both models and the difference lies merely in NAND: the 6300 uses more durable eMLC NAND, which increases the endurance to three drive writes per day from one in the 6000 with normal MLC. Due to the endurance, the 6000 is aimed more towards read-intensive applications such as online archiving and media streaming, whereas the 6300 is suitable for mixed workloads that includes for example big data analysis and financial transaction services.
Unlike Intel, OCZ doesn't offer a model for write-intensive workloads with super high endurance (10 DWPD). OCZ explained to me that the reason is mostly cost efficiency -- a high endurance drive is doable, but it would require additional over-provisioning (which is what Intel does) that would increase the cost. OCZ did some market research and concluded that most customers are seeking for lower cost NVMe drives to make the transition, so OCZ didn't see a huge niche for the expensive high endurance drives. At $1.70 and $2.00 per gigabyte, the Z-Drive 6000 series is certainly price competitive against Intel's P3x00 series and the premium isn't too large compared to the enterprise SATA/SAS SSDs.
At the time of launch, the Z-Drive 6000 series will be available in capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB. OCZ does, however, have a 6.4TB Z-Drive 6300 in development, which is scheduled to be available in Q4'15. The reason for the delay lies in NAND because in order to fit 8TB of flash inside a 2.5" chassis, OCZ needs to use 16-die packages, but currently the price of those is, from what I have heard, approximately 3x higher per gigabyte compared to 8-die stacks. The production as well as yields are expected to ramp up during this year, so the 6.4TB Z-Drive 6300 will be available once the NAND is available in high volume and at a reasonable price.
The Z-Drive 6000 series employs PMC-Sierra's "Princeton" controller, which is a native NVMe controller with support for 16 NAND channels. The controller supports PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, but OCZ has decided to split that to offer two independent 3.0 x4 connections to the host. The benefit of dual-port is redundancy and data availability because if one of the host systems is down (due to hardware failure for instance), the data is still accessible through the second host. This is a feature borrowed from SAS and the Z-Drive 6000 is actually the first NVMe drive to have dual-port support, which is something OCZ said its customers have been looking for.
Typical enterprise-class features, such as AES-256 encryption, full power loss protection and end-to-end data protection are all included as well. The Z-Drive 6000 series also features user-configurable power modes (15W, 20W and 25W), which can be used to limit the power consumption (and performance) in more temperature critical environments. A 2.5" 25W drive will definitely run hot and require a high amount of airflow for cooling, although OCZ did pay close attention to the chassis design to maximize heat dissipation and avoid throttling issues.
OCZ Z-Drive 6000 Series Performance Specifications | ||||||
Model | 6000 | 6300 | ||||
Capacity | 800GB | 1,600GB | 3,200GB | 800GB | 1,600GB | 3,200GB |
Raw NAND Capacity | 1,024GiB | 2,048GiB | 4,096GiB | 1,024GiB | 2,048GiB | 4,096GiB |
128KB Sequential Read | 2.2GB/s | 2.9GB/s | 2.9GB/s | 2.2GB/s | 2.9GB/s | 2.9GB/s |
128KB Sequential Write | 1.3GB/s | 1.9GB/s | 1.9GB/s | 1.0GB/s | 1.4GB/s | 1.4GB/s |
4KB Random Read | 600K IOPS | 700K IOPS | 700K IOPS | 600K IOPS | 700K IOPS | 700K IOPS |
4KB Random Write | 115K IOPS | 160K IOPS | 160K IOPS | 75K IOPS | 120K IOPS | 120K IOPS |
Mixed 4KB 30R / 70W | 290K IOPS | 330K IOPS | 330K IOPS | 230K IOPS | 280K IOPS | 280K IOPS |
Idle Power Consumption | 9W | 9W | 9W | 9W | 9W | 9W |
Active Power Consumption | 25W | 25W | 25W | 25W | 25W | 25W |
OCZ focused specifically on read performance and at up to 700K random read IOPS, the Z-Drive is definitely top of the class as Intel specs the P3700 at only 460K IOPS. Random write and mixed performance look excellent too, so it will be very interesting to see how the Z-Drive 6000 stacks up against the Intel and Samsung drives in objective third party testing. Note that the Z-Drive 6300 with eMLC is a bit slower in writes, which is due to the fact that eMLC NAND has higher program latencies (basically the voltage distribution for each voltage state is smaller, so programming requires more precision that is achieved by increasing the number of program pulse and verification iterations).
OCZ's own testing data puts the Z-Drive 6000 way ahead of the competition in terms of performance and consistency in both reads and writes. I would of course take the data with a grain of salt, but if the Z-Drive 6000 series is really as good as OCZ's marketing suggests, then OCZ has one hell of a drive in its hands. OCZ is currently sampling the Z-Drive 6000 series to key customers and partners, so I would expect more widespread availability to be later this year. All in all, it's a very potent drive that could very well help OCZ gain some market share in the enterprise space.
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extide - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Any more infor about the new controller used in these drives? Is it made by OCZ or is it third party? Any other info?THanks for the great articles BTW!
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Straight from the article:"The Z-Drive 6000 series employs PMC-Sierra's "Princeton" controller, which is a native NVMe controller with support for 16 NAND channels."
It's the same controller than Samsung uses in the XS1715.
extide - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Yeah, I read that, but was hoping for more info beyond that. Is PMC-Sierra a separate company or a division of OCZ/Toshiba? Maybe what kind of MCU does it use? (Cortex R?) How many cores? What process? ...nikhil.hwd - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
PMC sierra is a company which makes several chips/hardware for varied applications.you'll probably have to buy one and do a teardown to find out the internals.
If you are trying to gauge performance by the hardware specs, you'd be way off in your estimations while considering products in the enterprise market, atleast. ;)
KonradK - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
"The Z-Drive 6000 series supports the native Windows (8.1 & Server 2012 R2), Linux, UNIX, Solaris, and VMware NVMe drivers, although OCZ will also have custom NVMe drivers for Windows, Linux, and VMware for drive management reasons."Native NVMe drivers are also available for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 via https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941/en-... .
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Thanks for the heads up, I honestly didn't know that until now!toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
That idle power seems to indicate that heat will be an issue now or in the near future if they don't fix it.I have to wonder why vendors don't make 3.5" ssd drives with extra cheaper flash.
CoreLogicCom - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Because enterprise drives are trending into the 2.5" SFF. Really the only 3.5" drives left in enterprise are traditional platter drives in sizes not available in the 2.5" form factor (SFF mechanical drives currently max out at 1.2TB, at least with HP). The LFF goes up to 6TB if you're ok with the 7.2K spindle speed, but I expect when SSDs start seeing these capacities they will likely be SFF. Enterprise SSDs can be either SFF or LFF, but in my experience most SSDs purchased are SFF to drive up densities in typical rack server/SAN usage. LFF doesn't give you SSDs larger than SFF SSDs (at least with HP) which is the case with the mechanical drives. Most servers are purchased with SFF drive formats (mechanical or SSD or a mix) simply because its easier to get more drives into a rack server or SAN shelf which helps drive up the IOPs. We only buy LFF servers when its cost prohibitive to buy a SFF server with more smaller capacity drives to get the volume capacities we are after (mainly for surveillance video storage).jchang6 - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
I had Revo and Z-Drives several years ago, and was not happy. the interrupts were too high. I tried 2 Z-Drives in on system and there was poor scaling (none at all?) from 1 to 2. I switched to Vertex 3 MAX IOPS, then later Vector and Vector 150 on LSI SAS controllers (cheaper SSDs would drop out of the RAID controller, but worked fine standalone). This arrangement worked well, scaling from 1 to 2 controllers with 8 SATA SSDs each. I would like to give the new generation NVMe SSDs a try, with the intent of putting 2-4 devices in one system with the goal of scaling bandwidth versus number of devices.Droygon - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Hi,I think the "OCZ Z-Drive 6000 Series Performance Specifications" might have been wrongly swapped as the 6000 is stated to have better write performance than the 6300... which seems wrong.
Other than that - love this site :)