The new OCZ Z-Drive , the PCI-Express-connected, high performance solid state drive, with 450 MB/s read speed and 300MB/s write speed, is Now listed on Amazon.com with a 1 to 3 month lead time.

I am a huge fan of high-performance solid state drives. My first was an MTRON, which had about 100 MB/s reads – now I use a OCZ Vertex in my MacBook, which probably 50% faster than the MTRON.

These new desktop SSD drives skip the limitations of IDE and SATA connections by connecting directly to the PCI-Express bus. The downside is that you need a spare PCIe slot not being occupied by a video card – oh, and the price.

Inside, the Z-Drive is basically using a RAID setup to get more performance out of the flash memory chips.

On my MacBook, bootup takes about 24 seconds with my OCZ Vertex , and the system wakes from sleep immediately. Apps launch in no time at all, and it uses less power than the default 5400 RPM drive.

They have no moving parts, so SSD drives are more resistant to shock, make no noise, and very little heat. Although you can wear out the cells in an SSD, wear-leveling technology has gotten to a point where the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) can be significantly lower than a traditional mechanical hard drive (although this varies model to model).

Probably the most amazing difference I have seen with an SSD is when using it as an SQL data drive. I had a fairly large and complex database which, despite ongoing optimization, had some queries which were taking 30-40s. When I switched the data drive from a Fujitsu MAS 15k SCSI to an MTRON SSD, these same queries were sped up by a factor of 10.

Most of the reason for this is not the throughput speed of an SSD, but that the access time is typically less than 1ms, and does not vary depending on how far apart physically on the disk one read is from another, like a traditional hard drive.