LSI announces astoundingly fast PCIe SSD

by Pete Mason on 18 November 2010, 12:16

Tags: LSI

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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.



HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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So how much will this speed-demon set you back? The starting price for the 300GB WarpDrive is … around £9,000 inc VAT.

Damn, I was just thinking one of these would go nicely with my Q6600 and SLI 8800GTXs… ;)

Great for HPC and dataserver use, I guess - that's a lot of IO in a very small space. I assume this is essentially a pre-raided array of smaller disks?
scaryjim
Damn, I was just thinking one of these would go nicely with my Q6600 and SLI 8800GTXs… ;)

Great for HPC and dataserver use, I guess - that's a lot of IO in a very small space. I assume this is essentially a pre-raided array of smaller disks?

From what i have read on other sites it is basically 6 ssd pcb's in a raid array, to be honest though given the choice of a 6 drive raid array or this i know i would choose this just to be lazy.

you can see the “drives” are stacked to give the 6.
Wouldn't six SF1200 drives be faster, cheaper and leave some change in your pocket anyway.
Terbinator
Wouldn't six SF1200 drives be faster, cheaper and leave some change in your pocket anyway.

A 100 F60s would leave change in your pocket.

How does this compare to a ramsan?
mikemikemi
How does this compare to a ramsan?

ransam gets eaten alive by LSI WarpDrive, almost twice the bandwidth & IOPS.

Not the mention the physical size… :eek: