Sonnet Releases Tempo PCIe Card That Supports Two SSDs
Sonnet has released two Tempo PCIe SSD expansion cards.
Sonnet is launching two variants of its Tempo SSD Expansion Cards that allow buyers to mount either one (Tempo SSD) or two (Tempo SSD Pro) 2.5" SSDs. Since the card features a PCIe connector, it enables users to reap the benefit of a SATA3 SSD without needing the requisite SATA3 connector(s) on their motherboard. Sonnet also notes that when mounted in an external enclosure and connected via Thunderbolt, a Mac Pro can boot off the expansion card.
For those interested, the Pro variant allows users to configure the SDDs to run in a RAID-0 configuration for even faster speeds.
At the time of writing MSRP pricing is set at €151 for the Tempo SSD and €303 for the Tempo SSD Pro. No word on availability.

PCIe 2.0 is 5Gbps per lane so an x4 slot would be 20Gbps or ~2GB/sec after overhead.
The non-Pro model already costs close to $200 WITHOUT including the actual SSD, and the Pro model is about $400 dollars! For that money I'd rather get a real PCI-E storage card that isn't limited by SATA speeds, like the OWC Mercury Accelsior:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID
There's also the RevoDrives but I have since sworn not to touch anything OCZ since a number of bad experiences with their SSDs.
As for OCZs - I've got two Revodrives. The SSDs on it often fell off of their connectors. Result: data loss. After two months the vibration of starting fans and HDDs on power-on was enough to knock it off. Also I had total of 8 different OCZ SSDs, including Vertex 1, 2, 3, Onyx and Agility series. I had to RMA all of them, most of them twice. They were manufacturing fine RAMs, and all of my DDR-2 era machines were on OCZ, but now I'm surprised they still exist.
Some enterprise SSDs go way above 1000 write speed, I wouldn't worry about PCI-E bandwidth bottlenecking the SSDs.
Options are good and this provides just another option for the Mac Pro market which is still huge.
The OWC Mercury Accelsior is also targeted towards a Mac Pro market and is a much better buy than these Tempo cards which are basically glorified PCI-E SATA adapters that are still limited by the SATA protocol and overhead.
what i usually see is an 8x paired with ssds, and this appears to be a single lane, which is what i was wondering about, seems like a decent option depending on over all cost and size
While the Accelsior may be higher performing it doesn't offer the flexibility. You can use any 2 SSDs you'd like with the Sonnet.
Want to store SSDs? Buy a $0.10 piece of velcro.
Need SATA3? Spend about a third of the price of this piece of stupid device on a new motherboard.
Dumbest thing ever. Why did they develop this? There's zero application for it.
Just buy a SAS 6G Raid card for the same price and add your own SSD , and you can add 4 SSD minimum to 24 !!!
the only benefit of this thing is very small enclosure that has no place for Additional drives.
one PCI Express 3.0,2.0,1.0 Lane = 1GB/s, 512MB/s , 256MB/s
That's why if you are buying anything new , Buy PCIe 3.0 version , for 4X PCIe 3.0 = 8X PCIe 2.0 in bandwidth
here is a nice list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates
scroll down for PCI express