Solid State Drives have gained in popularity due to their inherent blazing fast speeds as compared to the much slower mechanical hard drives. There are SATA based solid state drives available but if the trend of developments and technology are anything to go by, even these may well become obsolete before gaining widespread acceptance. The latest and fastest SSD will be system level interfaces based on PCI-E. The pace of development in this segment is hotting up and one current offering which promises to be gobbled up by those with a liking for lightning fast SSDs is the PhotoFast PCI-E based GM Power Drive SSD. This is a new Intel NAND flash storage with the system level PCI-E integration.

What the developers of this device have done may look a bit involved but is simply elegant in its technical approach. Four standard SATA SSDs are attached to SLI MegaRAID SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) X8 PCI-E RAID controller which is then wired with SATA data and a 4 pin Molex power connector and the ensemble is housed in a red blower style housing. This device occupies the space of two PCI slots.

The developers have employed clever jugglery to come up with such a versatile SSD on a PCI-E bus which promises to be a future trend. SandForce offers devices with fastest and reliable performance, similar to Micron’s C300 drives. In effect it seems to be a revamped SandForce based PCI-E with Intel NAND flash on board. This combo claims to shatter benchmarks and raise performance levels to a new high.