Within hours of posting the news about the Z-Drive from OCZ, I noticed this press release from Super Talent. They are preparing to ship a direct competitor for the OCZ product called the RAIDDrive. It is an 8-lane PCI-express card that hold four SATA Solid State Drives with a RAID controller; in that regard it is comparable to the Z-Drive. The main difference is the availability of an expander board that brings the total number of drives up to 8.
The card uses an Intel IOP348 CPU running at 1.2 GHz, backed by 512MB or 1GB of cache memory. According to their specifications, the maximum read speed is 1400 MB/s, and the read speed 1200 MB/s. Without any additional benchmarks I find these numbers hard to believe; but it’s clear that these drives will offer better performance than SATA drives because of their faster interface.
Super Talent RAIDDrive
There are three models: the ES model is aimed at servers, including an on-board battery backup so the cache memory is saved in case of a power failure, the WS model aimed at normal users that want the highest performance by using SLC memory, and the GS model using MLC flash. All three types are available in various capacities, and are available with controllers supporting either RAID-0 or RAID-5. The only pricing info released so far is OEM pricing for the 1TB GS model, which should be around $5000.
| Part number | Usable capacity | Using expander | RAID level | Battery backup | Flash type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RDGS0-256G | 256 GB | No | 0 | No | MLC |
| RDGS0-512G | 512 GB | No | 0 | No | MLC |
| RDGS0-1T | 1 TB | No | 0 | No | MLC |
| RDGS0-2T | 2 TB | Yes | 0 | No | MLC |
| RDGS5-256G | 192GB | No | 5 | No | MLC |
| RDGS5-512G | 384 GB | No | 5 | No | MLC |
| RDGS5-1T | 768 GB | No | 5 | No | MLC |
| RDGS5-2T | 1.75 TB | Yes | 5 | No | MLC |
| RDWS0-256G | 256 GB | No | 0 | No | SLC |
| RDWS0-512G | 512 GB | No | 0 | No | SLC |
| RDWS0-1T | 1 TB | Yes | 0 | No | SLC |
| RDWS5-256G | 192 GB | No | 5 | No | SLC |
| RDWS5-512G | 384 GB | No | 5 | No | SLC |
| RDWS5-1T | 768 GB | Yes | 5 | No | SLC |
| RDES0-256G | 256 GB | No | 0 | Yes | SLC |
| RDES0-512G | 512 GB | No | 0 | Yes | SLC |
| RDES0-1T | 1 TB | Yes | 0 | Yes | SLC |
| RDES5-256G | 192 GB | No | 5 | Yes | SLC |
| RDES5-512G | 384 GB | No | 5 | Yes | SLC |
| RDES5-1T | 768 GB | Yes | 5 | Yes | SLC |
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[...] for connecting storage via PCI-Express slots. Something that is more than welcome, given the flurry of announcements about PCI-Express connected storage devices we’ve seen this week. Share [...]