There has been a lot of discussion and speculation and discussion on the speculation and speculation as to the bias behind the dicussion on the speculation over at XS forums.
Suffice it to say that in practice any of us could do this today (or yesterday) if we wanted. Buy a PCIe 8x raid card, I personally have a fetish for Areca and 2GB onboard cache, and 4-6 SSD's.
Make a raid-0 array and you are done. It is OS bootable and will have >700MB/s bandwidth sustained, >1.2GB/s bandwidth when writing to cache. (and 2GB of cache is a lot of cache
)
If you want more bandwidth and capacity you can buy a second raid card, and if it is an areca then you can hardware gang the raid cards for hardware support of raid-0, double your bandwidth again. (all for the low low price of double what you paid the first go around :laugh
What is novel about the OCZ approach is that it integrates the flash drives into the raid controller board directly.
This offers the opportunity of decreased cost for the enchilada (raid card + SSD's) but comes with the downside of not being upgradable/expandable. With a discreet raid-card and discreet SSD's, replacing the SSD's or the raid-card (or adding SSD's) need not require you to replace your entire investment at once.
But talk about drop-in easy (presumably, if it is a standard raid-card integrated into the OCZ device)...plug it into the PCIe slot, configure the onboard BIOS at boot, load up your driver and you are done. Unfortunately your boot times will likely become longer, not shorter, as the initialization of the raid card's bios will no doubt require a good 20-30 seconds (they all do for some damned reason).
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