The Inquirer reports that a new company is preparing a challenger to the i-RAM (which is now available here and there at about $125).
There’s practically no information about it, but all you really need to know can be seen just by looking at one.
This card uses a PCI-E interface, rather than the SATA interface used by the i-RAM. This is good.
However, the PCI-E interface is only 1X. This is not so good.
A 1X PCI-E interface means that theoretical throughput is limited to 250MB a second. That’s better than the iRAM’s 150MB theoretical max, but not as good as two iRAMs in SATA RAID mode.
The point is not to say which one would be better. The point here is that even if this company delivers perfectly on its promises, this still will be a card where the interface is still a huge bottleneck.
What the world really needs in a consumer solid state hard drive is not just a PCI-E device, but rather a PCI-E device that can plug into a PCI-E slot 4X or greater. Ideally, it would plug into a PCI-E video slot for those people who can manage to live with just one video card.
(The world might also need some OS and other changes which can take full advantage of such throughput, too. What the world could use right away is someone who truly knows what he or she is talking about explaining what other bottlenecks exist besides the interface which prevent, say, a two-second boot, and what, if anything can be done about that.)
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