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OCZ preps affordable PCIe solid-state drive

COMPUTEX — Think those new SandForce solid-state drives are neat? Wait 'til you see OCZ's RevoDrive, a very aggressively priced PCI Express solid-state drive that blends SandForce goodness with an internal RAID 0 configuration.

OCZ tells us it will price the 120GB RevoDrive at $450. That might not sound like such a good deal, until you hear the rated performance numbers: 540MB/s for reads, 530MB/s for writes, and 75,000 IOPS. For reference, Intel's 160GB X25-M sells for just over $450 right now, and it only writes at up to 100MB/s, according to Intel. (Reads go up to 250MB/s.)

The OCZ RevoDrive should be in stores in four to six weeks, OCZ tells us. The drive will be bootable, will fit into a PCIe x4 (or longer) slot, and won't have TRIM support because of the internal RAID. There will be built-in garbage collection, however. Oh, and see that connector in the middle of the circuit board? A couple of months after the RevoDrive hits stores, OCZ plans to release a daughter card that will plug right in there and double the capacity.

We asked OCZ why it hadn't gone with a Serial ATA 6Gbps interface instead of PCI Express. Interestingly, the company revealed that, right now, implementing a SATA 6Gbps controller would actually increase costs over a PCIe solution.