Woaah -- behold the future. LSI has been working on a PCI Express interface SSD. This device has a bandwidth of 1,500MB/s sustained sequential I/O and 1,200MB/s sustained random I/O, regardless of the read/write mix. The company apparantly is sampling this unit to OEMs as we speak.

The product will be tagged onder SKU LSISSS6200 PCIe SSS (solid state storage) solution and is meant for enterprise servers, where fast data access is crucial. It has a low latency and uses few CPU resources, even while delivering up to 200,000 4K sequential I/Os per second (IOPS), as well as 150,000 4K random IOPS.

"Future customer requirements related to price, performance, power consumption and reliability align well with the benefits of solid-state storage," Jeff Janukowicz, research manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Drives at IDC, said. "PCIe-based SSS solutions, such as the LSISSS6200, can reliably meet next-generation data center needs with an improved price-to-performance ratio compared to traditional storage solutions."

"The new LSISSS6200 card utilizes the industry's most widely deployed software stack to deliver an enterprise-capable, drop-in storage solution," Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Division, LSI, explained. "Providing customers with a new tier of storage between system memory and low-cost disk drives, without sacrificing reliability or simplicity, PCIe-based SSS solutions represent the next evolution in storage architectures for market segments requiring extreme performance."

There is no word on when the device will actually be released on the market and what it's horrendous price will be. None the less this is killer stuff, great to see it developped.