There are plenty of companies selling SSDs, but few seem as driven to transfer your data at ludicrous speeds as OCZ. The company behind the impressive PCIe RevoDrive is now taking a different route to high speeds with the all new IBIS.
The drive makes use of a proprietary interface that OCZ is calling High Speed Data Link (HSDL). Using a standard SAS connector, the technology allows a maximum throughput of 10Gbps, which the manufacturer claims will increase to 20Gbps next year. It's not all about bandwidth though, as the interface also has a lower overhead than either SATA or SAS, as well as other additional features.
On the inside, the 3.5in drive looks much the same as the PCIe RevoDrive, with four SandForce 1222 controllers in a RAID configuration that allow for read and write speeds of 740MBps and 720MBps respectively. You'll also be able to squeeze out 120,000 4k random write IOPS.
Obviously, there aren't any platforms out there that support HSDL, so OCZ will be bundling the drive with a PCIe x4 host-bus adapter card. While the company only makes a single-port card at the moment, it will be offering quad-port cards in the future for four-drive RAID arrays or single-drive/quad-connection arrangements for a ridiculously-high bandwidth connection to four-port drives.
As ever, cutting-edge hardware comes at a price, and the 100GB IBIS will start at around $529 (£412 inc VAT), shooting up to $2,799 (£2,183 inc VAT) for the 960GB model. While you'll have to wait for a few months until these drives hit the market, both HotHardware and Anandtech have been given the chance to take prototype versions of the technology for a test drive.
