14 DAY TRIAL // The world of solid state drives just became larger now that a certain company decided to set aside the SATA connection for a while and delivered a model designed to be connected to a certain other motherboard interface.
PCI Express solid state drives are far less common than 2.5-inch models designed to work on SATA ports, or even than external/portable ones with USB or eSATA.
In fact, PCIe models are actually hard, if at all possible, to find on the consumer market, although they have definite benefits in small to medium businesses, servers and larger enterprise applications.
This once, it is OCZ that built one or, more specifically, three of these things, naming them the VeloDrive series.
They are made to look and feel like add-in boards (AiBs) and utilize controller chips developed by SandForce.
In this respect, they are similar to the Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5-inch models, which use the SATA 6.0 Gbps connection and were unveiled just days ago.
Granted, the Vertex 3 use the SF-2200 controller, while each VeloDrive has four SF-1565 controllers set up in RAID configuration.
"The VeloDrive is the latest addition to our comprehensive lineup of PCIe SSDs. A truly configurable solution, it helps a range of customers accelerate their application performance," said Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management, OCZ Technology Group.
"The ability to run the VeloDrive in multiple modes provides clients with the freedom to use the raid stack of their choice. This maximizes performance and creates faster, more seamless deployments with RAID stacks that may already have been qualified for their unique usage model."
For those that want specifications, the 300 GB, 600 GB and 1.2 TB drives use MLC NAND Flash chips, low-profile PCBs and boast an MTBF of 2.5 million hours.
Finally, random write performance is of 130,000 4KB IOPS, while data transfer speeds can go as high as 1 GB/s. No pricing details were given, but availability should come soon.