OWC Previews Stackable PCI-Express SSD – CES 2012 EXCLUSIVE Update

Lets start off CES with something that couldn’t be any less than a great story in the world of SSD technology. Early this morning and long before the flood of activity started, we were able to get pretty much impossible press access to the CES North Hall for an exclusive announcement from Larry O’Connor, Founder and CEO of Other World Computing.

Get ready for your first look at the ‘stackable’ OWC PCIe SSD Card capable of up to 2TB in capacity

Based on a motherboard capable holding up to four mPCIe SSDs this card can be purchased in as little as a 60GB capacity and size (and performance) added on up to a total of 2TB. There is no requirement for all mPCIe slots to be filled and this solution is definitely a first and great concept for those whose performance and capacity needs increase over time.

As we can see here the card is connected via a PCI-Express 2.0 x4 interface and contains the Marvell 88SE9445 SATA 6Gb/s RAID controller.  Each mPCIe SSD simply clicks in or out for ease of installation or removal.

blankEach mPCIe card will contain either the LSI SandForce SF-2281 or SF-2282  SATA 3 processor and houses a total of eight Toshiba Toggle mode NAND flash memory, four on the front and four on the back.

blankblankAlthough specifics weren’t available just yet with respect to exact performance, Larry did state that the card should be available as soon as four to six weeks for purchase.

blank  The card is still being kept very low key and, at this point, we believe that The SSD Review is the only such website with knowledge or a first hand look….up until now anyway.

blankStay tuned as we bring you more OWC coverage shortly and my thanks to the team at OWC for a great start to our CES tour!

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8 comments

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    Are they going to market this an an ‘enterprise’ level unit? Does it have supercap functionality?

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    If these are for consumer / enthusiast use, I am anxious to see motherboard compatibility. One problem with the OCZ Revo-series is a rather limited number of motherboards that they are compatible with. Compatibility with a wider range of MOBO’s would give them an immediate leg up into the market.

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    I doubt it will be enterprise as OWC does not really go after that market and this is to user configurable to be enterprise (users can put in any number of modules on the card)..

    I am more interested in speed, IO’s, and compatability……

    I have bought from them before and everything has performed flawlessly, hope this will also.

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    Can’t wait to compare its performance to my OCZ Revo Board in my Mac Pro. OWC has been teasing us with the promise of a PCIe SSD card since 2010 so I expect they’ve finally done their homework: looking forward to something that can compete with the latest Revo at ~240,000 IOPS & 1900MB/s. Anything less will be a disappointment.

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    Here’s the press release from OWC in 2010 claiming their PCIe SSD would get 4GB/s sequential read/writes & 480K IOPS. Is this what we can expect with this product?

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