Super-Talent Announces PCI-Express SSD, “RAIDDrive”

You may recall last October when when we first found out about Fusion-io and their PCI-Express-based SSD. At the time, it was hard to gauge the true worth of such a product, but it’s becoming a lot easier to do so now. Months later, the same company followed-up with their ioDrive Duo, a drive that offers insane Read and Write speeds, and one heck of a price tag. They mean serious business.

Since then, OCZ also decided to join the fray, by showing off their Z-Drive solution at CeBIT last month. That drive appeared to be bulkier than Fusion-io’s solution, but it also happened to include 1TB of space, so the extra bulkiness is understandable. It apparently wasn’t only OCZ who wanted to follow-suit, because Super Talent today announced their own solution, the “RAIDDrive”.

I won’t bother getting into what a boring name that is, but it does go to show that PCI-Express SSDs are here to stay, and must have some real use somewhere. Super Talent boasts 1.2GB/s Read speeds, and oddly enough, 1.3GB/s Write speeds. I don’t recall ever seeing a storage device that actually had higher Write speeds than Read speeds, but I can now check that off my list. Pricing, not surprisingly, hasn’t been released, but if you have to ask, just go buy a car instead.

RAIDDrives support up to 2 TB of MLC or SLC Nand Flash memories, have a turbocharged DRAM Cache, and the RAIDDrive ES is fully battery backed to protect data in the event of power loss. The RAIDDrives connect through a PCIe Gen. 2.0 x8 interface and are capable of delivering sequential Read speeds of up to 1.2GB/s, sequential Write speeds of up to 1.3GB/s. More performance details will be unveiled in June. As an optional feature users will be able to configure the drives with an internal RAID5 capability to deliver an extra level of data protection for mission critical applications.