When it comes to PCIe solid-state storage with transfer speeds that'll make your head spin, your only real choice was Fusion-io - not that it was a bad choice, if you had $14,000 to spend. Now, though, there's a new contender and its ready to compete for your storage lust.
The LSI WarpDrive is a decidedly enterprise-focused affair, and it's able to blow the impressive performance figures of OCZ's consumer-focused RevoDrive X2 clean out of the water. The 300GB SLC memory manages a maximum sustained throughput of 1,400MB/s, almost matching the Fusion-io ioDrive Duo's eye-watering performance. The numbers for 4k random operations are equally astounding, hitting 240,000 IOPS and 200,000 IOPS for read and write, respectively.
According to LSI, it would take 400 mechanical hard-drives and 36U of rack space to match these sorts of numbers. They would also draw 300 times as much power as a single WarpDrive's meagre 25W.
Impressively, the PCIe x8 card manages to fit into a half-length, low-profile package. While Fusion-io's ioDrive Duo manages to hit similar performance levels, it takes up a full height PCI slot, making it unsuitable for some systems and servers.
So how much will this speed-demon set you back? The starting price for the 300GB WarpDrive is $11,500, or around £9,000 inc VAT. For anyone with particularly deep pockets - or a large company's IT budget to spend - the PCIe SSD should be available towards the end of this month.
