today will be the most expensive item I
have ever unboxed on lineus Tech tips by
a fairly significant margin I might add this is the ocz vlo drive PCI Express
solid state drive and what makes this so expensive is the fact that it is a
1.2 terabyte yes a 1.2 terabyte SSD pretty
cool featuring San Force 1565
controllers uh that is multiple ones
let's go ahead and get this party
started so you can see it comes in a fairly plain brown box it is shrink
wrapped so we're going to go ahead and relieve it of its shrink WRA
prison okay
so this is more of an Enterprise grade solution rather than being consumer
oriented so no the expectation from ocz
is not that Average Joe is spending 5 grand on a 1.2 tab SSD for his gaming
system but there is a market for this stuff so the product does exist let's go
ahead and take off the cover as you can imagine they don't you know produce a
ton of these so there isn't like a special box just for the 1.2 tab sssd
let's see what we got inside here so first we have a lowprofile
bracket which also includes what else is in here some thermal interface material
DIY and a heat
sink all right so we got a heat sink and a thermal
pad oh okay so it looks like when you put on the low profile bracket the heat
sink is no longer attached so you have to attach a you have to attach a new one
there's actually ventilation back here so this must be a pretty toasty card in
an installed scenario okay so next we have sorry guys
my battery died got it replaced now and
here it is the
1.2 tbte V drive so how many sand Force
controllers do we have we have one
two uh three four so this is a double decker PCB much like
the revo Drive 3x2 products uh they are
using Intel nand Okay so we've got what
is this six 12 chips per controller so
I'm going to go ahead and show you guys the back so you won't see any controllers on the back because the
controllers for this PCB are in between
okay so what what kind of density is that so these must be using some of the
highest density chips out there if we have 1.2 tab so that's equivalent to 4
240 gigs no hold on 480 no what are
these things give me a sec you know what I'm going to confess I actually don't
know exactly what the densities of these chips are but I can tell you that there
are 12 * 4 48 chips so uh basically what
it comes down to is how much spare area ocz has left so if you guys remember
when the vertex 2 originally launched it was a Vertex 2 5100 or 200 00 gig and
then they had an extended version which actually didn't have any more chips on
it and those were 60120 and 240 so depending how much leftover area or
spare area they've left which I would imagine is quite a bit on an Enterprise
Drive this could be anywhere from the
equivalent of 4 360 gig drives up to 4
480 gig drives depending how much left over they have either way I'm telling
you these are very high density chips and this is a very very serious business
controller card so here's that heat sink I was talking about before so right
under there is in all likelihood actually why don't we just why don't we
just find out what's under there give me a sec all right so since this is obviously
meant to be user swappable we're going to take off that stock
bracket go ahead and remove those screws we got one more screw here that goes
into that top PCB okay so this is a $5,000 SSD I'm
working on right now
and we're going to find out exactly what chip that is so that is
an LSI chip LSI SAS
20004 I don't know what controller that is okay Fusion
MPT I'm not familiar with this particular piece right here but I can
tell you guys right now it is made by LSI so unlike the revo level consumer
level s um PCI Express ssds which are
generally using sort of a more of a tier tier three solution this is using a tier
one raid solution which looks like a serious chip in terms of the horsepower
that it's delivering because you do have to have this cooler on it you can see
the other side this one has the thermal interface material pre-applied so
that'll show you how you are intended to uh assemble the low profile bracket
should you require it uh it has a PCI Express 8X inter face
I don't know if I mentioned that before so that's giving you a ton of bandwidth
between the system and the SSD itself
and in terms of specs they actually include almost no information with the
product whatsoever I guess the assumption is that if you're buying one
of these you already know everything there is to know about it and you're
fairly certain you need one because if you're buying a $5,000 SSD and you end
up not needing it I don't know too many retailers who are going to be like yeah
sure no problems bring that back full refund no big deal so uh there you go
this is the ocz vlo drive 1.2 tbte PCIe
8X SSD you saw it unboxed first here
online is Tech tips don't forget to subscribe