14 DAY TRIAL // On the PCI Express solid state drive market, companies usually do their best to outdo one another, leading to ludicrously overpowered storage devices with equally ludicrous prices. Sonnet wanted to step away from that freight train for once.
PCI Express solid state drives are an odd breed, easy to mistake for sound cards, wireless adapters, or a myriad of other things if they're all out of their packages. That's assuming you're not familiar with hardware of course.
They had a hard time at the beginning, lacking the ability to boot an operating system, among other things.
However, their colossal storage potential and speed compared to SATA units ultimately was too important to waste, so SSD makers kept refining the form factor until it became the remarkable storage solution of today.
Sonnet Technologies releases the Tempo PCIe SSD
Interestingly enough, the Tempo PCI Express SSD card was built around an M.2 module. M.2 is a new form factor for NAND Flash storage devices, taking as much space as two of your fingers, though much thinner.
It means that you can, in theory, replace the actual SSD with another one, later. Taking out the screw and unplugging the drive should be easy enough.
In its current incarnation, though, the Tempo has a storage space of 512 GB and a top transfer speed of 1,100 MB/s.
Not on the same level as, say, 2 TB drives with 2,200 MB/s speeds, but Sonnet wasn't really aiming for those ludicrous heights anyway, as we said.
The point was to outperform the SATA III 6.0 Gbps interface, which is clearly achieved (SATA units barely reach more than 555 MB/s, even on their best day). If the M.2 SSD had been powered by a SATA controller instead of a PCI Express-ready chip, things would have been different. But it isn't, so they aren't.
The Tempo PCIe SSD low-profile PCI Express 2.0 card, with attached M.2 PCIe SSD, can be installed in any PCI Express x4 or faster slot, making it suitable for any Windows or Mac Pro system. Thunderbolt-to-PCIe card expansion system can accept it as well.
Availability and pricing
The Sonnet Technologies Tempo PCI Express SSD is selling for $799 / €799 and bears the part number PCIE-SSD1-512-E. If nothing else, it will make M.2 drives usable by PCs that lack the new interface.
"The Tempo PCIe SSD boasts performance once exclusive to multidrive storage systems with eight or more hard disk drives plus a high-end RAID controller card," said Robert Farnsworth, CEO of Sonnet Technologies. "Through its wide compatibility and ultra-high performance, our Tempo PCIe SSD provides convenient internal storage expansion through any available PCIe slot."
