14 DAY TRIAL // About a month or so ago, LSI introduced the WarpDrive SLP-300 PCI Express high performance solid state disk and, although the card managed to blow us away with its staggering performance numbers, we had a few questions regarding its availability as we couldn't find the WarpDrive listed anywhere on the web.
However, it seems like the first batch has already hit Japan, as some pictures posted by the Expreview website depict the card in all it's glory in a Japanese Akihabara store.
For those of you that don't remember, the WarpDrive this is basically made up from six SSD drives that are run together in RAID 0 mode with the help of an LSISAS2008 controller that also packs PCI Express functionality.
All the six solid state disks are based on the SandForce SF-1564 SSD processor and feature 32nm SLC NAND flash memory chips.
As a result, LSI's PCIe SSD offers 300GB of storage space as well as some impressive performance numbers, the company stating the WarpDrive has a latency of 50 microseconds, MTBF of 2,000,000 hours, maximum continuous read and write speeds of 1400MB/s and 1200MB/s, respectively.
Furthermore 4KB random reads are rated at 240,000 IOPS while 4KB random writes come at 200,000 IOPS, the boards power consumption being set at 25W.
The WarpDrive goes into an empty x8, or greater, PCIe slot and comes with boot support so it can be used as the main system drive.
As we reported previously, the recommended retail price is set at a not so affordable $11,500, the card listed in the Japanese store being a tad more expensive since it was sold for 998,000 Yen, roughly $11.900 US.
Sadly, we don't know when WarpDrive becomes available in other parts of the world, but it shouldn't take too long for this to happen since this first batch is already out.