As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on OCZ reliability, even with Toshiba ownership. Toshiba drives aren't exactly in the sakes class if Seagate and WD, so states for their own drive reliability are harder to come by, and I don't go by testimonials.
I'd like to see some long term testing here and in a couple of other sites known for that before thinking of buying in.
If you're referring to TechReport's endurance testing, that test is pointless in pointing out overall reliability. It only tests the endurance capability of the drive and NAND, which for years has been known not to be an issue for client workloads. For reliability testing you would needs hundreds of drives that are tested in numerous hosts and environments, which is something that no site has the resources to do.
That said, I did use a 512GB Vector as my boot drive for over two years (sent it to one of our other editors last week) and it never gave me any trouble, but of course a sample size of one doesn't mean much.
I think he might be referring to OCZ's peppered history, between the higher failure rate on their earlier SSDs and the scam they were running on consumers - changing NAND with worse performance without changing model number or even the SKU - Anand covered the story if I recall correctly.
todlerix is correct. I'm talking about their high failure rate vs the rest of the SSD industry. The major reason the company went belly up, and was then bought by Toshiba was because of poor reliability. The drives failed fairly rapidly for numerous reasons related to poor QC.
Until we know that Toshiba has reversed that failure rate, the idea of buying an OCZ drive, particular drives at this price level seems to be a risk, particularly with toshibia's own QC issues.
Things change. We don't know the story with this controller. As an important little reminder: a line of hard drives called "deathstars" 5 years ago are now the most reliable consumer drives on the market.
Hi melgross, thank you for your comments. As an OCZ representative I'm proud to say we've come a long way the old company no longer exists. Being a part of A Toshiba Group Company and having access to premium Toshiba NAND we have completely redone our products and put great focus on quality starting from the product design cycle through manufacturing. You can see our failure rate data on our website: http://ocz.com/consumer/quality We‘ve made this information public to further show evidence of our quality improvements. We believe we have a very competitive offering today when it comes to reliability and product quality and hope we will have the opportunity to prove it to you in the future.
I understand that general consumers will pay a premium for thinner and smaller components, but does it really make that much of a difference in the enterprise space to justify the cost per gigabyte increase just to fit into the 2.5" form factor?
Although at some point you will get problems with cooling, power distribution etc. especially in older data centers. Real estate is rather cheap compared.
In the data centers, you have to pay for the space (network, power, and others as well) and they're expensive to rent out as you can't just build a data center anywhere you want.
The more dense and localized your server racks are, the more money you save in the long run.
Internally the drive consists of several (likely three) PCBs that are stacked on top of each other, hence the thickness. A single PCB isn't enough to incorporate 4TB of NAND along with a massive controller and capacitors for power loss protection.
who are they making this drive for exactly? After their last product announcement, I visited their website and inquired about sampling (I work for a server OEM), and got no response. If they aren't following up with OEM requests, who ARE they marketing their enterprise product to?
Hi RU482 thank you for your comment. As an OCZ representative I'm sorry to hear you didn't get a response when you inquired about sampling during our last product announcement. The Z-Drive 6000 SSD series are made for OEMs. Please use this link http://ocz.com/enterprise/contact/americas-office to contact us and we will make sure you are taken care of.
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? ...
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. ;)
"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."
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).
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.
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.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
33 Comments
Back to Article
melgross - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on OCZ reliability, even with Toshiba ownership. Toshiba drives aren't exactly in the sakes class if Seagate and WD, so states for their own drive reliability are harder to come by, and I don't go by testimonials.I'd like to see some long term testing here and in a couple of other sites known for that before thinking of buying in.
melgross - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Wow! My own typo reliability is pretty high. Sorry.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
If you're referring to TechReport's endurance testing, that test is pointless in pointing out overall reliability. It only tests the endurance capability of the drive and NAND, which for years has been known not to be an issue for client workloads. For reliability testing you would needs hundreds of drives that are tested in numerous hosts and environments, which is something that no site has the resources to do.That said, I did use a 512GB Vector as my boot drive for over two years (sent it to one of our other editors last week) and it never gave me any trouble, but of course a sample size of one doesn't mean much.
todlerix - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
I think he might be referring to OCZ's peppered history, between the higher failure rate on their earlier SSDs and the scam they were running on consumers - changing NAND with worse performance without changing model number or even the SKU - Anand covered the story if I recall correctly.melgross - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
todlerix is correct. I'm talking about their high failure rate vs the rest of the SSD industry. The major reason the company went belly up, and was then bought by Toshiba was because of poor reliability. The drives failed fairly rapidly for numerous reasons related to poor QC.Until we know that Toshiba has reversed that failure rate, the idea of buying an OCZ drive, particular drives at this price level seems to be a risk, particularly with toshibia's own QC issues.
willis936 - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Things change. We don't know the story with this controller. As an important little reminder: a line of hard drives called "deathstars" 5 years ago are now the most reliable consumer drives on the market.ocz_tuff_bunny - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Hi melgross, thank you for your comments. As an OCZ representative I'm proud to say we've come a long way the old company no longer exists. Being a part of A Toshiba Group Company and having access to premium Toshiba NAND we have completely redone our products and put great focus on quality starting from the product design cycle through manufacturing. You can see our failure rate data on our website: http://ocz.com/consumer/quality We‘ve made this information public to further show evidence of our quality improvements. We believe we have a very competitive offering today when it comes to reliability and product quality and hope we will have the opportunity to prove it to you in the future.Anonymous Blowhard - Monday, May 25, 2015 - link
With a history like this:- The Vertex 2's silent shift to poorly performing 25nm NAND
- Abnormally high failure rate in Vertex 3
- "Benchmark boosting" of the Vertex 4
no one should be surprised that the consumer sentiment against the OCZ brand is summed up as "once bitten, twice shy."
Xenonite - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
I understand that general consumers will pay a premium for thinner and smaller components, but does it really make that much of a difference in the enterprise space to justify the cost per gigabyte increase just to fit into the 2.5" form factor?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
YES! Smaller form factor yields higher density, which reduces overall space requirements as less racks are needed to achieve the same total capacity.nils_ - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
Although at some point you will get problems with cooling, power distribution etc. especially in older data centers. Real estate is rather cheap compared.MikhailT - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
In the data centers, you have to pay for the space (network, power, and others as well) and they're expensive to rent out as you can't just build a data center anywhere you want.The more dense and localized your server racks are, the more money you save in the long run.
jann5s - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Why does this drive require 15mm thickness? Is the internal volume really used?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Internally the drive consists of several (likely three) PCBs that are stacked on top of each other, hence the thickness. A single PCB isn't enough to incorporate 4TB of NAND along with a massive controller and capacitors for power loss protection.RU482 - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
who are they making this drive for exactly? After their last product announcement, I visited their website and inquired about sampling (I work for a server OEM), and got no response. If they aren't following up with OEM requests, who ARE they marketing their enterprise product to?ocz_tuff_bunny - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
Hi RU482 thank you for your comment. As an OCZ representative I'm sorry to hear you didn't get a response when you inquired about sampling during our last product announcement. The Z-Drive 6000 SSD series are made for OEMs. Please use this link http://ocz.com/enterprise/contact/americas-office to contact us and we will make sure you are taken care of.vishnumrao - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
I would like you guys to do a performance & reliability comparison article between the OCZ, Intel, Samsung & HGST NVME drives.nikhil.hwd - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
+1Kristian Vättö - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Performance we can do, but reliability is something that would require dozens of samples and months of work to provide any relevant data for analysis.vishnumrao - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Yes, I agree reliability testing will be difficult for you to do! Hopefully we can get a comparison article on the 4 enterprise offerings!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 :)
Droygon - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Well... never mind... just keep reading I guess... srry...SanX - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
At such dimensions crashresistant RAMdrive would be still 5 times faster. Stackable RAM is coming too.nils_ - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
PMC actually offers a drive like that, although the largest model is only 16GB.