IBIS is the first SSD using OCZ Technology’s work with the storage interface HSDL that was presented at Computex earlier this year. OCZ IBIS is a 3.5″ drive with four SandForce controllers together and an interface with 2GB/s bandwidth.
Current SATA SSD units are already so fast that it gets hard separating them during regular use, but even if retail has reached several limits, there is an unsatisfied need among servers and workstations.
OCZ uses HSDL (High speed data link) to target this segment and its IBIS SSD is the first storage unit using the technology. HSDL is simply a replacement for the regular SATA interface. Instead of limiting the units with the relatively low bandwidth and high latency of the SATA controller, HSDL works directly over the faster PCI Express bus.
OCZ IBIS is, beside the larger format, 3.5″, like any other SSD. On the back we find a SAS port that through a high quality HSDL cable connects to a HSDL-compatible PCI Express card, which results in a potential data speed of up to 2 Gigabyte per second.
OCZ IBIS has an internal 4-way RAID 0 array with SandForce controllers, but they take things further by by connecting four units to a HSDL RAID card.
The performance potential is of course fantastic and if OCZ can build a cooperation with motherboard manufacturers, which is in progress, HSDL can be a fresh wind in the server storage segment. Already there are a couple of reviews of OCZ IBIS and it performs as expected.
OCZ IBIS reviews:
