The world of Solid State storage technology is full of surprises and the development rate is exceedingly progressive. It's a growth market where if you play your cards right, you can put down a technology foundation and expand to the greatest technology in the years to come. Once OCZ technology had a taste of Solid State storage units they became thirsty and started changing their entire business model and thus shift their focus towards this technology. First the regular SSDs, then addressing the corporate market, we then noticed a couple of company takeovers like with more recently Indilix and yeah, this year at Computex we noticed that OCZ is aggressively adapting into many markets and channels with a diversity of products.

The development rate is however going so fast that current component technology cannot keep up with the pace. See, this year we had the transition to SATA 3 (6G) and the minute SATA 3 came out these new 6G controllers already started reaching their maximum bandwidth with the latest generation SSDs.

That's nothing new though, as with SATA2 OCZ adapted to that as well, with their first generation RevoDrive. The OCZ RevoDrive 3 (x2) PCIe SSD is a RAID 0 solid state drive which slips into the PCIe slot of your PC motherboard.

The bare essence of that product is to put multiple SSD clusters into one product. The NAND flash memory is tied to multi-channel controllers, and these controllers then lead towards another controller, a RAID controller. They put it in the pan, stir it, shake it, boil it and boom ... your RAID0 array is throwing silly numbers over the PCie express bus, instead of that limiting SATA connector.

With the new NAND flash types, the new SandForce controllers and a new proprietary RAID solution from OCZ themselves, they have been paving the yellow brick road with a sexy update -- the all new RevoDrive 3 and RevoDrive 3 X2.

We'll be testing a beta / engineering sample of that RevoDrive 3 X2 today. Let me just throw some numbers at you to get that tickly in your belly ; 1500 MB/s maximum read performance, or what about 1250 MB/s maximum write performance ? No that still didn't do it for you ... well what about 200.000 IOPS (4K writes) ? Yeah that is where we have arrived in the year 2011.  It's insanely fast, it will be insanely expensive but it is most definitely insanely sexy.

Have a peek before we dive into the architecture behind the RevoDrive 3 X2, and then put the pedal to the metal.