SSD on a card

[Asus]

OK, so OCZ had a product it will be releasing in the future that has (upgradable) SSD modules on a PCI-Express card. This will be bootable. More potential for future SSD chips since PCI-Express has a higher bandwidth than SATA. But it can hit the speeds it says because it does RAID on the card. I wonder if you could do software RAID on 2 of these...

But the idea of chips instead of a drive is awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if we had storeage chips (what is inside SSDs). Just plug them into separate slots on the motherboard next to the RAM for storage. Except instead of sticks of 2, 4 and 8GB they could total 2TB.

Top speed is 1.4GB/s for the top OCZ card.
Burst speeds for Intel's X25-M SSD are 250MB/s.

DDR RAM peak rate is 1.6GB/s. So the OCZ card is basically as fast as RAM...

You may remember Gigabytes i-Ram, it can only transfer up to 150MB/s because it uses plain SATA (PCI connection for power only). The RAM can talk with the controller chip on the card up to 1.6GB/s but that rate can't hit the PC because it talks via SATA.

And the RAM cards can only hold a few GB for storage unlike SSDs or the OCZ card.

 

[VirusType2]

Sweet. Would like to get my Windows install on one of these RAM chips (once they make them big enough). Damn, that would be fast.

 

[AtomicSpark]

This is either incredibly awesome or incredibly silly.

 

[Dinnesch]

Might pick up an SSD in a few years, these days the performance/price ratio is very bad(compared to good HDD's like Samsung Spinpoints).

1.4GB/s sounds pretty insane, if you compare that to what normal HDD's/SSD's reach today.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

I've got to get me one of those.
Using SSDs for Windows and Steam is already pretty damn fast. This is just insanely fast.

 

[VirusType2]

1.4GB/s sounds pretty insane, if you compare that to what normal HDD's/SSD's reach today.

Yeah, it's like your entire installation of Windows and every aspect of it is already loaded into RAM.

Oh, man - in the future, they will look back at 2010 as ancient times, with applications that took seconds to load. They would laugh at us.

 

[Acepilotf14]

How much will these go for?

 

[Quixoticism]

Yeah, it's like your entire installation of Windows and every aspect of it is already loaded into RAM.

Oh, man - in the future, they will look back at 2010 as ancient times, with applications that took seconds to load. They would laugh at us.

Well with the newer SSDs that's already happening. Some tests show that Windows 7 can boot from post in 13 seconds. Now that's really what I'm interested in.
And come end of this year/beginning of the next we'll see the new process for flash drives on Sata 3!

 

[Asus]

Since these will be standard SSD chips I don't think latency will be much different. Just the bandwidth gets a boost from the chips in 4 or 8-way RAID on the card. Wonder what scenarios will and won't be helped by SSD in RAID.

Also you won't be seeing marketing on motherboard boxes referring to SATA 6Gb/s as SATA3 like last generations of SATA. "Features SATA 2!"

edit:
Here is a review of SSDs in RAID (from 2008). They test a single drive and then 2, 3 and 4 drives together in RAID 0. And then a 3 drive RAID 5 setup.
Access times don't change with SSDs.
4 SSDs in RAID0 (chart at bottom) look awesome across the board and that is on SATA3GB/s

Also it looks like there is a similar product that is not bootable (Fusion-io). Most of their solutions are like 700MB/s (ioDrive) but their ioDrive Duo says 1.4GB/s.
The ioDrive looks like it competes a lot better than 4 Intel SSDs in RAID.
Other review.