LSI WarpDrive 300GB PCI Express SSD Review

When we sit back and look at the evolving storage market and SSD technologies, there are a couple of competitive camps that are trying to gain traction, in what is without question one of the largest growth areas in storage. The major players in solid state storage solutions have emerged from old-line, incumbents in hard disk media and then also a new breed, specializing exclusively in SSD technology. Major memory manufacturers like Intel, Micron and Samsung, along with specialty shops like OCZ and Corsair, are making a push with their expertise in memory, whereas players like Western Digital and Seagate also have skin in the game, but are walking the line carefully, as the migration from spinning media to solid state slowly shapes the landscape. 

LSI is the sort of company that has been a household name in storage for many years; highly respected and trusted in the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) space, especially in high availability datacenter and media server applications.  If we consider companies like LSI and their competitors, like Adaptec and AMCC (3Ware), you'll note that they're in a unique position in this storage technology migration, in that they can almost take an agnostic stance, in terms of which media type and market opportunity they decide to resource development efforts.  For players like LSI, with a wealth of HBA controller IP at their disposal, they can relatively easily adapt and re-tool their technologies to service NAND Flash SSD memory structures and bring compelling solutions to market as market demand develops. 

The LSI WarpDrive that we have on hand for you here is representative of LSI's efforts to capitalize on the company's strong SAS RAID controller technology base, combined with the most cutting-edge SSD technologies on the market today.  We'll call to your attention early here that the WarpDrive means business though.  With a $11,500 MSRP and street pricing in the $7400 - $8K range (yes, we're not sure what's up with that), end-user enthusiasts are likely not going to belly-up the justification to support the cost of a storage subsystem that is much more expensive than a typical entire system build. The LSI WarpDrive is targeted to the datacenter, workstation and server markets, where gobs of bandwidth, instantaneous random access and high reliability mean money in the bank, and as a result, "total cost of ownership" becomes increasingly more practical. 

Alas, we'll squelch the marketing speak, before your eyes begin to glaze over, and get down to the details.  After all, we've got some of the fastest PCI Express-based SSD technology money can buy on the test bench and we intend to light it up for you to see on the pages that follow...