While roaming around at IDF, Ryan spotted a couple of new OCZ parts that were strangely absent from Flash Memory Summit:
You are looking at what is basically a Toshiba NVMe PCIe controller and flash, tuned for consumer applications and packaged/branded by OCZ. The only specific we know about it is that the scheduled release is in the November time frame. No specifics on performance yet but it should easily surpass any SATA SSD, but might fall short of the quad-controller-RAID RevoDrive 350 in sequentials.
As far as NVMe PCIe SSDs go, I'm happy to see more and more appearing on the market from every possible direction. It can only mean good things as it will push motherboard makers to perfect their UEFI boot compatibility sooner rather than later.
More to come on the RevoDrive 400 as November is just around the corner!
Yes, it’s nice to see more
Yes, it’s nice to see more and more NVMe storage. Unfortunately there is one massive obstacle. Even X99 is not enough to efficiently accommodate more than 4-5 drives. Sadly there are no dedicated AICs to connects 2.5″ in quad configuration.
As for boot compatibility. It’s fine thank you very much. Every X99, Z97, Z170 runs it (exceptions yes, but that’s just bad luck), still IMHO buying it just to run boot drive and not hit it with some worthwhile workload is waste of money. I don’t care how quickly system boots (W7), it takes with RAID AICs over 60 seconds anyway, but when it’s up NVMe really showing some teeth. VMs start 50% faster and responsiveness of VM is off the scale. Directories with 100 or 200k files hashing content in 3 seconds instead 10 (SSD array R10). Encoding video is so quick sometimes that I just can’t believe it. The only thing which lacks for me from NVMe is serious RAID capability with Redundancy (with capital R).