OCZ IBIS HSDL Solid State Drive previews
You know you're talking about some seriously fast solid state storage when the standard Serial ATA interfaces aren't enough to handle the performance it offers. Enter OCZ's latest IBIS series of drives, which are also the first to use the company's new HSDL interface designed specifically for enterprise-level SSDs. Check out these two previews to learn a little more about the technologies at play here.
Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.
The first SSD to use HDSL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5†chassis. The four controllers sit behind an internal Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller. The four PCIe lanes stemming from the controller are combined and sent over the HSDL cable to the receiving card on the motherboard. The signal is then demuxed by a chip on the card and passed through to the PCIe bus.
AnandtechThe first SSD to use HDSL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5†chassis. The four controllers sit behind an internal Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller. The four PCIe lanes stemming from the controller are combined and sent over the HSDL cable to the receiving card on the motherboard. The signal is then demuxed by a chip on the card and passed through to the PCIe bus.
OCZ tells us that the IBIS product family will be offered in a range of densities, as you can see in the chart above. We've tested the 240GB model that offers up to 720MB/sec max read throughput and 720MB/sec maximum write throughput. Of course, blazing fast SSD technology like this also comes at a premium, as you'd expect. With the average higher-end 256GB SSD weighing in right around $579 or so for a Sandforce-based drive or the likes of Micron/Crucial's 6G SATA C300 SSD, you're looking at roughly a 30 - 50% premium for the IBIS drive. As always, at the very high-end, you've got to pay to play and sometimes the scaling is linear with performance, while other times not so much. We'll see what the case is for the IBIS but first, let's take a look at what the drive is made of, next.
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