PCI-E (v PCI?) v SATA solid state drives?

Hi, I'd be interested to know what the Scan team thinks of the new PCI-E type SSDs, I noticed in Jellyfish you use the cheaper SATA ones and was wondering what the reasonings were behind that?

Someone mentioned further down my thread in hexus that it takes longer to initialise to boot up so may not be suitable for use as system drives, but would be interested if any tests have been done, haven't been able to find much on the internet other than what I linked there already. The speeds claimed are approx 3x SATA ones and seem to be approx 2x the price/GB at least for the OCZ ones (wasn't able to find any Corsair PCI-E ones btw on http://froogle.co.uk )

Found this also that looks interesting: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusi...-Match/?page=1

Quote:

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I'll go out on limb here a bit and say that a couple of years from now, things might look very different for SSD technology and that the SATA interface itself might very well be approaching its twilight years.

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though the price difference on those ones is a lot more rather than the 2x cost of OCZ OCZSSDPCIE-ZDP84256G Z-Drive P84 256GB ("Read: Up to 770MB/s Write: Up to 640MB/s") @ £1149.99 versus Corsair Extreme Series X256 GB ("240MB/s sequential read and 170MB/s sequential write speed") @ £533.57

I also can't find any on your site, only SATA ones

http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ml#post1807010

According to the various recent press releases the OCZ ones at least seems to be bootable, kind of concerned though if boot up is slowed down and by how much (I read a comment from another user here, though it could be just a rumour), can't find any reliable information or testing on the net so far

- Other than that I can't see any reason why not to buy them over a SATA drive, the speed *sounds* ridiculous at least when it's 3x compared to the top-end intel ones..

Still no reply, but nevermind, I did some more research thanks to a few pointers from other hexus peeps :) Apparently they are only fast for large amounts of data (which is probably why they are marketed as "enterprise" for servers etc, not typical use:

http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ml#post1807614

However 2x Intel x25-M SSDs in RAID-0 seem to give double the random IOs/second speed and 4x drives give just over 3x the performance

One thing I noticed while making comparisons is that in the benchmarks the top Corsair drive seems to be quite a bit worse at read speeds and more focused on write (the 2 smallest high-end drives offered are 256GB Corsair X256 29.08 MB/s read / 63.45 MB/s write v 160GB Intel X25-M G2 58.50 MB/s read / 34.50 MB/s write), that's about half the speed..... which seems that it would be worse for gaming? I was wondering why use the Corsair ones then since your top-end systems are primarily aimed at gaming?