OCZ IBIS SSD review

Once we open up the drive, we stumble into three PCBs, the first being the CMOS, interface IO and RAID controller.

From left to right, we spot a small Maxronix MX29LV Series 3 CMOS IC. In the middle obviously the Silicon image RAID controller, model 3124 SoftRaid 5. Softraid indicated that it will use some CPU cycles for it's operational tasks.

All the way to the upper right we spot a Pericom PI7C9X130 IC, which functions as PCIe 4x link inbetween the SSD and add-on board. The typical usage in this configuration is to “bridge” legacy 64-bit PCI products to PCI Express systems.

When we take out the rest of the PCBs and zoom in a little at the the other two PCBs, we spot the NAND FLASH storage with each PCB having two SandForce controllers, the latest SF1200 series. One IC used per FLASH memory partition and PCB, so that's four SandForce controllers in total, wowzers....talk about an expensive solution.

Now the SSD needs to connect to your PCIe slot in some way or form. So through the HSDL link we now go to a small add-on board. This card has a x4 PCIe lane design. That doesn't mean you need a dedicated x4 PCIe slot. You can pop it into a x16 slot and it will work fine. We again spot a Pericom PCI Express Bridge, making the actual PCIe 4x link happen. Two of these chips (one on each side) really is the heart of the HSDL interface.

Your data has now finally arrived at your computer's PCIe bus.

When you think about it, it's not at all a charming solution, whenever I see cables and extra components I see latency. However, credit where credit is due... this setup works really well.