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FINAL THOUGHTS
If you ever wonder just how fast technology is advancing, a quick look at one of our first Samsung SSD Review will open your eyes. Three and a half years ago, we tested the first Samsung SSD release and realized top performance of 100MB/s.
Todays benchmarks of the Z-R4 are 28 times better and easily capable of being 52 times better should OCZ add on another Superscale Storage Accelerator to the mix (hint, hint).
After all, the Z-R4 contains eight (8) SandForce SF-2281 processors. Can it be anything other than fast?
The OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCI Express 2.0 SSD did much more than open our eyes though; it knocked us off of our feet. Its performance of 2.8GB/s is mesmerizing and the thought that we can double this performance with another chip, resulting in well over a million IOPS, is incredible. The Z-R4 is tuned for large queue depths and, as funny as it is, we had to rely once again on IOMeter as the newest and greatest in SSD Benchmark Software (Anvil Pro) can only test to a maximum QD of 64. The problem with this, of course, is that the Z-R4 lives and breathes QD128 which makes this one of the best enterprise storage devices available for its price point.
As much as the Z-R4 will soon become a main stay in the enterprise environment, we can’t help but wonder how many are salivating over the thought and wondering if they can stretch their budget just a bit.
After all, it only takes a quick driver installation, placement in the PCIe slot and a reboot to get her up to speed.
The amusing reality of any enthusiast OCZ Z-Drive R4 purchase is, however, that they really don’t have to worry too much about stretching their budget, especially when the Z-R4 can be considered a steal at a purchase price of $7/GB.
As for us, included return shipping instructions found in the original package guarantees this SSDs flight back to California in record time! Uuuuuh…. Where are those shipping documents again? Oh oh….
Credit also has to be given to FUSION-IO as they have a great SSD in the ioDrive Duo and it did reach some amazing performance benchmarks. The io-D was, in fact, the only comparable product that we truly thought could even offer competition to the Z-R4 which shows our reasoning behind such a comparison review. As for our final call, it has to be the OCZ Z-Drive R4 by a KO!
Would be more fair if you compared it to the 1.28 TiB variant of the Duo.
Brilliant article none the less…
I agree totally but we have to work with the hardware that we have access to. As for the compliment of it being a brilliant article, totally unexpected and thank you very much.
“we have to work with the hardware that we have access to”
OK, so you have access to the fastest OCZ hardware but not the fastest FIO hardware…and this makes for a subjective test? Seriously? When do you expect to have current hardware for live testing? Any chance we might get actual server-side testing to show off the true strength of FIO hardware and, more importantly, software? Oh wait, then we couldn’t have a test could we…you’d need a competitor other than OCZ….
WE would be pleased to hear suggestions as to other sources of competition for the card. Thanks ahead.
not sure why the harsh response or love affair with Fusion. Why do you care which company? I say Fusion should put up the hardware like OCZ and do real life tests within applications. Both companies can put there money where their mouth is.
Harsh response? Love affair? I guess I am a bit confused because, well, myself, when I read an article I want to know the reviewers opinion and feelings just as much as I do facts alone. This is what keeps my interest.
It is also an important factor to help the reader. Take for instance the stuttering 602 controller a few years back. Can you imagine a reviewer saying, ” The drive stalls and stutters a bit but is still a large step up from a hard drive” Say it like it is I believe and hope our fellow members feel the same.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and expressing your feelings.
This is subjective because the z-drive r4 is cheaper than the FIO drive.
You find it subjective because one performs alot better yet is alot cheaper? How so?
Please update using the ioDrive 2 they just released, also
Finally SSDs start approaching the RAM speeds. Not very useful yet for the regular users without deep pockets. So meantime we still get 2-5 times of these speeds with software based QSoft RAMDrive and, thanks to DRAM price drop, at the $5/GB. While many even never heard of that but we are enjoying such crazy RAMDrives’ speeds for our apps for almost a quarter of century since the DOS times.
Suggestion to authors – test it just for fun. The latest QSoft Enterprise edition or one of Romex Software have a lot of nice functions allowing to auto backup the RAMdrive and load it back when you switch on and off your computer. Yes it might be lost if PC crash if you do not autobackup things, but this typically never happen, It is not for servers or critically important files but in its turn it is soooooo much faster and is eternal (well, lifetime guarantee) and no wearing off, TRIM, problems with compressed or 4K files.
I do not know while similar board designs of RAMDrives as these two SSDs are not making its road to the world (with just the battery backups) – they are so much faster t yet
nice review. I like both of these companies, but I think you need to compare the iodrive II DUO if you really want to compare head to head what each manufacture would put against another. Another addition that would be nice is to see performance of actual work like indexed data using lucene. What is the performance gain on these working enviornments.
We have been in contact with FusionIO during CES and just may be able to appease your request soon enough.
OCZ Z-R5 is also coming
Sorry, but thinking this through HP should donate some equipment or Dell as well as updating the cards and also add tests of real applications to see performance gains. This was a great article none the less. Thank You
“Is there really a need for anything that fast?” with 4 dual GPUs being used for CUDA/OPenCl application you do need even more than what is being provided to keep the GPUs filled with data with bottleneck.