Having Toshiba swoop in and acquire all of OCZ Technology's storage assets might have been the best thing that could have happened to the company. Without skipping a beat, OCZ Storage Solutions -- a newly formed entity owned by Toshiba and run by many of the same employees as before -- has been announcing new storage products, including today's introduction of the enterprise-class Z-Drive 4500 PCI Express SSD Series.

The new Z-Drive 4500 Series picks up where the previous generation Z-Drive R4 Series left off. It uses faster 19-nanometer multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, is integrated with OCZ's new Windows Accelerator (WXL) flash management and caching solution software for Windows Server applications, and comes in 800GB, 1.6TB, and 3.2TB usable capacities.


"Our new Z-Drive 4500 Series represents a consistency with our enterprise strategy as we continue to refine and introduce new products across key interfaces like PCIe using the latest NAND flash process geometry and architectural changes that enable a more efficient design," said Daryl Lang, SVP of Product Management for OCZ Storage Solutions. "By integrating our new WXL Software into the Z-Drive 4500 platform, we are delivering a complete acceleration, caching and flash management solution to the enterprise PCIe storage market with advanced capabilities and a robust architecture as well."

Once again, the Z-Drive 4500 Series is driven by OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) and LSI SandForce SF-2582 controller chipset. Combined with Toshiba's fast NAND flash memory chips, OCZ says its new PCIe SSDs can reach up to 2,900MB/s read and 2,200MB/s write speeds, along with a ridiculously high random 4K block read throughput of up to 252,000 IOPS and random 4K block write throughput of up to 76,0000 IOPS.


In addition to raw speed, the new SSDs offer power loss data protection that protects in-flight write operations in the event of a sudden power failure, end-to-end data path protection that performs data integrity checks at every data juncture, 128-bit AES encryption, TRIM support, temperature sensing and thermal throttling, and more.

OCZ is offering the new cards in a Full-Height/Half-Length (FHHL) format with a 5-year warranty. No word yet on price.