By now, no one doubts the speed improvements offered by choosing an SSD, but for those users that don't find such drives fast enough there is a new type of disks available that drop the SATA interface in favor of PCI Experss to offer much higher transfer speeds, PhotoFast's PowerDrive being the latest drive to join the party.

Built using an LSI RAID controller, the PowerDrive is available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB variants, featuring 512MB of DDR2 cache memory and a x8 PCI Express interface in order to offer much higher performance then regular SATA attached SSD drives.

PhotoFast promises speeds of up to 1400 MB/s for reads and 1500 MB/s for writes while the PowerDrive is also compatible with a wide range of operating systems including Windows 7 and a large number of Linux distros.

Although PhotoFast's claims are indeed impressive, I have to wonder how well does this fare in real life situations since TRIM support is not available (this being a limitation imposed by the use of SSD drives in RAID mode), and, as everybody knows, garbage data collected during the drives operation can really hurt SSD performance if a resilient controller is not used.

Unfortunately, infos regarding pricing are not available and we don't know if the PowerDrive is bootable or not, but, considering the performance and size of this thing, I don't expect PhotoFast's PCIe SSD to come as a cheap alternative to regular solid state disks.