PhotoFast's Smoking Fast PowerDrive SSD Makes Us Giddy

Quick, what's bright red, crazy fast,and comprised of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory? If you guessed PhotoFast's new PowerDrive-LSI PCI-E solid state drive (SSD) line, then give yourself a cookie. And while you're at it, thank a teacher, because we both know you cheated and read the headline. We're glad you did, because PhotoFast has put something together worth salivating over.

Forget about SATA 6Gpbs, the PowerDrive-LSI slides into a x8 PCI Express 2.0 slot and serves up blistering fast transfer speeds you won't get from your SATA controllers. We're talking up to 1,400MB/s reads and up to 1,500MB/s writes, putting this peppy drive ahead of most of the competition, including PhotoFast's own 1Gbps G-Monster. The only other drive on the planet that can really compete is OCZ's Z-Drive, which is good company to be in.


Other bodacious features include 512MB of onboard DDR2 cache, an internal RAID controller, and robust support for a variety of OSes, including Windows Server 2003/2008/2008R8, Windows 7, XP, Vista, several versions of Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, VMWare ESXi 4.0, and more.

Word on the Web is that these will start shipping in October in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars (not really, but what's the over/under that this thing approaches anything near affordable?).