Sonnet Releases Tempo PCIe Card That Supports Two SSDs

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Sonnet has released two Tempo PCIe SSD expansion cards.

Sonnet Releases Tempo PCIe Card That Supports Two SSDs : Read more

 

[alidan]

how much speed can a pcie solt handle? because those ssds could get 1000 write speed and i usually see that speed in an 8x card option

 

[InvalidError]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]how much speed can a pcie solt handle? because those ssds could get 1000 write speed and i usually see that speed in an 8x card option[/citation]
PCIe 2.0 is 5Gbps per lane so an x4 slot would be 20Gbps or ~2GB/sec after overhead.

 

[merikafyeah]

That's a pretty looooong card. Any case that can accommodate a card that long would probably be fitted with a motherboard that supports SATA 6.0Gb/s anyways, leaving the target market for this card strikingly thin.

The non-Pro model already costs close to $200 WITHOUT including the actual SSD, and the Pro model is about $400 dollars! For that money I'd rather get a real PCI-E storage card that isn't limited by SATA speeds, like the OWC Mercury Accelsior:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

There's also the RevoDrives but I have since sworn not to touch anything OCZ since a number of bad experiences with their SSDs.

 

[Vatharian]

I completely don't understand the point of this hardware. You want PCI-e SSD? What for? Oh, enterprise? Get FusionIO or Microm. This is full height card, so no 1U and 2U servers. But wait, you can get full total 14 SSDs extra on PCI-e slots on full ATX! Wow, that's fine, for jbods, for 7x150$. So... what do you do? You get 99$ HighPoint RocketRaid 640 that has 4 SATA ports, and hardware RAID 5, then you get 35$ 6-in-1 2.5" dock (Chieftec CTM-1062S), and... you can have for 868$ in total place for 28 SSDs with hardware Marvell-based RAID-5 (and place for two spares), in comparison to 1050$ and 14 SSDs.
As for OCZs - I've got two Revodrives. The SSDs on it often fell off of their connectors. Result: data loss. After two months the vibration of starting fans and HDDs on power-on was enough to knock it off. Also I had total of 8 different OCZ SSDs, including Vertex 1, 2, 3, Onyx and Agility series. I had to RMA all of them, most of them twice. They were manufacturing fine RAMs, and all of my DDR-2 era machines were on OCZ, but now I'm surprised they still exist.

 

[Non-Euclidean]

Is there really a market for this?

 

[fearless1333]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]how much speed can a pcie solt handle? because those ssds could get 1000 write speed and i usually see that speed in an 8x card option[/citation]

Some enterprise SSDs go way above 1000 write speed, I wouldn't worry about PCI-E bandwidth bottlenecking the SSDs.

 

[halcyon]

This device is meant, primarily, for Mac Pro's. ...and, therefore, it can reach and feel several generations back. That's the market for this. A PCIe RAID card that you can slink a couple SATA3 SSDs to.

Options are good and this provides just another option for the Mac Pro market which is still huge.

 

[merikafyeah]

[citation][nom]halcyon[/nom]This device is meant, primarily, for Mac Pro's. ...and, therefore, it can reach and feel several generations back. That's the market for this. A PCIe RAID card that you can slink a couple SATA3 SSDs tptions are good and this provides just another option for the Mac Pro market which is still huge.[/citation]
The OWC Mercury Accelsior is also targeted towards a Mac Pro market and is a much better buy than these Tempo cards which are basically glorified PCI-E SATA adapters that are still limited by the SATA protocol and overhead.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]fearless1333[/nom]Some enterprise SSDs go way above 1000 write speed, I wouldn't worry about PCI-E bandwidth bottlenecking the SSDs.[/citation]
what i usually see is an 8x paired with ssds, and this appears to be a single lane, which is what i was wondering about, seems like a decent option depending on over all cost and size

 

[halcyon]

[citation][nom]merikafyeah[/nom]The OWC Mercury Accelsior is also targeted towards a Mac Pro market and is a much better buy than these Tempo cards which are basically glorified PCI-E SATA adapters that are still limited by the SATA protocol and overhead.[/citation]
While the Accelsior may be higher performing it doesn't offer the flexibility. You can use any 2 SSDs you'd like with the Sonnet.

 

[mynith]

Funny how the current Mac Pro is the only Mac that actually has expansion slots and doesn't actually have Thunderbolt. There's a new one due soon, though.

 

[jesot]

This is one of the most useless things I've ever seen in my life.
Want to store SSDs? Buy a $0.10 piece of velcro.
Need SATA3? Spend about a third of the price of this piece of stupid device on a new motherboard.
Dumbest thing ever. Why did they develop this? There's zero application for it.

 

[RedJaron]

Soooo, a card to add SATA III support to a mboard that's more expensive than a new mboard with SATA III? Because a $20 PCIe -> SATAIII card is not enough?

 

[sna]

What is the use of this?

Just buy a SAS 6G Raid card for the same price and add your own SSD , and you can add 4 SSD minimum to 24 !!!

the only benefit of this thing is very small enclosure that has no place for Additional drives.

 

[sna]

how much speed can a pcie solt handle? because those ssds could get 1000 write speed and i usually see that speed in an 8x card option

one PCI Express 3.0,2.0,1.0 Lane = 1GB/s, 512MB/s , 256MB/s

That's why if you are buying anything new , Buy PCIe 3.0 version , for 4X PCIe 3.0 = 8X PCIe 2.0 in bandwidth

here is a nice list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates

scroll down for PCI express