AngelBird’s PCIe SSD solution brings breakneck speeds at a price of a shoe

PCIe SSD solutions have always been bloody expensive. SSD itself is already expensive to implement, but when you bring in PCIe SSD solutions for even faster speed, that’s gonna bloody hell blow away your bank. But now, your instantaneous booting dreaming can come true, in a fraction of a price all thanks to the holy Angelbird Wings solution.

With read performance of up to 1GB/s and writes happening at up to 900MB/s and costing ‘merely’ $239 for a 16GB model, the pricing isn’t too bad – for this sort of setup, anyway. At least they tried. It’s a good start you know. What you’re getting for that money is an expandable PCIe controller board with slots for up to four SSDs of 120GB in size, each offering SandForce 1200 controllers. With one board you’ll get pedestrian read and write speeds of just under 300MB/s. But, with each new drive you basically multiply that, with the maximum figures quoted above coming with four. Interestingly, the controller comes with its own onboard Linux flavor called Virtue, a full UI that you can boot directly into and get all your RAID ducks in a row. Full cost for a fully kitted out system with four boards? $1399, which is hardly cheap for a mere 500GB or so of storage, but is a solid price for 1GB/s performance.