PCI vs. SATA SSDs?

Solution
Devices like the OCZ Z-drive which go into the pci-e slots are essentially tuned hardware raid controllers with SSD's attached. The manufacturers use the pci-e slot. (in the case of the Z-drive it's a 8x slot) to overcome the 3 Gb/s limit with the SATA interface. 3 Gb/s is about 300 MB/s where the z Drive does somwhere around 500+ MB/s of data throughput.

sub mesa

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Let's get this straight; its PCI-express or 3GIO; not PCI. Those two interfaces couldn't be different from eachother; they are the exacty opposite in numbers of ways.

Ive seen cheaper ones posted in these forums too, with PCIe x1 link. The wait is for good third-party SSD controllers, so we can use PCI-express as interface instead of SATA for our SSDs. It would make sense to do it via PCIe, especially if you're breaking the 1GB/s boundary which is great for marketing.

 
Devices like the OCZ Z-drive which go into the pci-e slots are essentially tuned hardware raid controllers with SSD's attached. The manufacturers use the pci-e slot. (in the case of the Z-drive it's a 8x slot) to overcome the 3 Gb/s limit with the SATA interface. 3 Gb/s is about 300 MB/s where the z Drive does somwhere around 500+ MB/s of data throughput.
 
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Radi8r

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Sep 16, 2011
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My question is, are there any configuration issues inherent with using PCIe SSD's as boot drives and is there anything to be gained by doing this? I have a friend that reads catalogs and then throws these types of configurations at me and honestly I don't see any gains.
 
As of right now there is no TRIM support for SSD's in a RAID array. So every now and then you will have to take the array down, perform a low level format, then reinstall. Also benchmarks show that the latest Revo drive only shines when the que depth goes over 1, rare for like 99% of users out there. With Sata3 and single SSD's able to hit 500 MB/s, IMO a single SSD will be more reliable for the long run.