OCZ Technology Group this week officially launched its premium line of solid-state drives with unbeatable performance and designed for installation into PCI Express x4 slot. The incredible performance also means incredible price and in order to make Z-Drive products slightly more popular, OCZ released 250GB and 500GB versions in addition to 1TB demonstrated earlier this year.

“Designed for ultra high performance consumers, the Z-Drive takes the SATA bottleneck out of the equation by employing the ultra fast PCI-Express architecture with a RAID controller and four Vertex controllers configured in four-way RAID 0 within an all-in-one product, making this solution ideal for applications that put a premium on both storage performance and maximum capacity,” said Eugene Chang, vice president of product management at OCZ Technology Group.

OCZ Technology released four versions of its Z-Drive with different capacities – 250GB, 500GB and 1TB – and different levels of performance due to peculiarities of RAID 0 operation. Maximum speed is offered by 500MB version that delivers up to 510MB/s read speed and up to 480MB/s write speed. Z-Drive is based on multi-level cell flash memory chips.

PCI Express x4 interface with 1GB/s bandwidth should provide speed for one of the industry’s first PCIe-based SSDs.

Based on preliminary estimates, OCZ 1TB Z Drive should cost $1500 - $2000. Actual pricing will be announced at a later date and will depend on the region.

With a price-point like that, it is hard to expect OCZ’s new product to become a bestseller, still, it is possible to expect the novelty inside premium-class gaming machines that may retail for $10 000 without monitor.

Tags: OCZ, Z Drive, SSD