Super Talent RAIDDrive II Plus PCIe SSD Writes at 3.2 GB/s
Super Talent's new SSD is very, very speedy!
Super Talent has announced a new PCIe-based SSD – the RAIDDrive II Plus.
This SSD is based on a PCIe 2.0 x8 interface, and features a total of eight internal SSDs connected through a SATA interface, configured to work in either a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array.
The RAIDDrive II Plus is a very high-performance SSD; it has read speeds of about 2600 MB/s, while it can write at up to 3200 MB/s. Consumer-grade SSDs with a single SATA3 interface are child's play, in contrast. On-board users will also find 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory, which is used as a cache.
One of the notable features aboard is the unit's ability to send out notifications through SMTP, allowing the owner to receive information on the unit's status in case something goes wrong.
Super Talent will release the units with three different capacities, each configured with either a RAID 0 array or a RAID 5 array. There was no official word on pricing yet, but if you do want one when they hit shelves, you can expect to have to part with a rather sizable sum of money.

Also Knowom, there have been bootable PCI-E SSDs. OCZ RevoDrive and ASUS ROG RAIDR for example. As for the USB trick, that only caches data, it doesn't store it like an SSD will. Plus USB 3.0 is theoretically 5 Gbps, and that barely equates to 600 MB/s. That is what a standard SSD pushes on the SATA 3.0 (3.2 being almost 2 GB/s). Also you won't have the capacity like you can have on SSDs with USB sticks. SSDs are finally approaching 1 TB (not efficient or cost friendly versions, but they are there), and USB you may find a 512 GB at best (costing ~$1 per GB as well).
(Excuse the double post. The website tripped up).
1TB USB Flash, but obviously not as fast.I've been anxious for a while for one heck of an SSD running on PCIE ports that is both crazy fast and affordable.
I really doubt everyone will jump ship. The problem is that MB/sec is the inverse of how humans perceive speed. We perceive things in terms of sec/MB. If something takes a fraction of a second, it's fast. If something takes several seconds, it's slow.
How does that matter? When you invert the metric to sec/MB, the vast majority of your speed gain comes from upgrading from a HDD to a regular SSD. The speed gain from switching to a 3 GB/sec PCIe SSD is marginal. e.g. Say the drive needs to read 1 GB of data to boot.
HDD (100 MB/sec) = 10 seconds
SSD (500 MB/sec) = 2 seconds (8 sec improvement from HDD)
PCIe (3000 MB/sec) = 0.3 seconds (9.7 sec improvement from HDD, 1.7 second improvement from SSD)
So the 400 MB/sec increase going from the HDD to the SSD gives an 8 sec improvement. But the 2500 MB/sec increase going from the SSD to PCIe SSD only gives a 1.7 sec improvement. That's what happens when you invert the metric from human perception - the bigger the numbers get, the smaller the perceived improvement. The bigger the number, the less it matters. Both Toms Hardware and Anandtech have published articles pretty much admitting this. That the only reason they post benchmarks in MB/sec is because if they do it in sec/MB, all the SSDs look pretty much the same. They're all very fast and there's very little difference between them. They use MB/sec to exaggerate the difference and keep readers interested and coming back to their reviews.
So if you look at the improvement range from HDD to PCIe SSD, about 83% of the improvement can be gained by buying a SSD. Going to a PCIe SSD only gets you an extra 17%. So unless PCIe drives drop down in price to where they're at most about 15%-20% more expensive than a SATA SSD, they're not going to really gain marketshare. They're going to be relegated to niche applications where you need super-fast access to large amounts of data (e.g. real-time video editing).
It'll happen eventually because of the inevitable march of technology (the SSDs will have 16- or 32- banks internally instead of 8 so cost shouldn't really be a factor). But there won't really by a compelling reason for most people to ditch their current SSDs for the new ones because the improvement in perceived speed is marginal. Incidentally, RAM disks score about 6000-10000 MB/sec on these disk benchmarks, so we are getting close to topping out drive speed. It's already hard for me to tell when the computer is swapping on a 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD.