14 DAY TRIAL // Most solid-state drives use the SATA interface, like hard disk drives for that matter, but there are PCI Express SSDs out there as well, and they are a lot better at everything than SATA ones. OCZ has just launched what might be the fastest PCIe drives yet.
The new range of PCIe SSDs from OCZ is called RevoDrive 350 and is composed of three SSDs, with capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB, respectively.
More importantly, they each have four LSI SandForce SF-2282 controllers that act in concert, allowing the drives to move data at up to 1.8 GB/s.
On that note, the 4K random write performance is of 140,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
It’s no wonder that OCZ expects the things to be used in scientific computing and extreme gaming systems, as well as workstations of all sorts.
And since they support up to 50 GB of host writes per day for 3 years, they have endurance too, making them useful in professional media.
The PCI Express x8 interface had to be used here, since x1 or x4 slots weren't about to allow that much data to be moved at once.
It's surprising, in a way. Until now, PCI Express x8 slots weren't only used fully by high-end graphics cards.
And considering the fact that most x8 slots are actually x16 ones configured downwards, that puts OCZ's RevoDrive 350 on the same level as AMD and NVIDIA video boards, so to speak.
That said, the new SSDs are made from 19 nm Toshiba NAND Flash memory chips and, unlike video cards, take up a single PCI Express slot.
You don't have to worry about the SandForce controller chips either, because the VCA 2.0 technology makes the SSD appear as a single drive, not four. SMART and TRIM technologies are, of course, part of the spec sheet as well, and the RevoDrive 350 are bootable also.
This was one of the main limitations of PCI Express SSDs when they started out, a few years back: they couldn't boot. Now that BIOS'es and Flash technology has advanced, though, this is no longer a problem.
You can imagine that computers with Windows, or whatever else, installed on an SSD like this one will show the main screen just seconds after you press the power button. It's the OS that will struggle to keep up with the drive instead of the other way around.
Sadly, OCZ has not shared the prices of the 240 GB, 460 GB and 960 GB RevoDrive 350 PCI Express SSDs with anyone yet, though it did specify the 3-year warranty.