Although consumer SSDs are far from a mature technology, PCIe SSDs are even further behind on the growth curve. The upside is huge. As SandForce has already demonstrated with the right dataset a single SSD can nearly saturate the 6Gbps SATA bus. Rather than force OEMs into putting yet another very high bandwidth bus on the motherboard, SSD vendors everywhere (Intel included) turn their attention to PCIe as a solution to the problem.

The holy grail is a native PCIe solution. Recently Micron announced such a thing: the P320h. However the estimated price tag on the P320h could be in the $5000 - $10000 range depending on capacity.

Manufacturers in the consumer SSD space are attracted to PCIe solutions simply because margins are higher. For the most part, client storage is a commodity and if you don't make the NAND and controller going into an SSD you're not making a ton of money selling drives to end users. Sell to an enterprise customer and all of the sudden a couple thousand dollars per drive seems like a bargain.

OCZ started making PCIe SSDs the simplest way possible. Take a couple of SSDs, put them on a single PCB behind an on-board RAID controller and you're good to go. The single card performance was decent but of course there were issues. A single controller failure would take out the whole drive and things like TRIM weren't supported either.

Recently OCZ has been trying very hard to be more than just a rebrander of components. The acquisition of Indilinx puts a wedge between OCZ and a lot of its former peers in the memory business, but it's still a far cry from Intel or Samsung. Its latest PCIe SSD is another step in the maturing of the company. This is the RevoDrive 3 X2:

Read on for our preview!

Over the summer we previewed OCZ's first affordable PCIe SSD: the RevoDrive. Made of a pair of SandForce SF-1200 controllers behind a PCI-X RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCIe bridge, the RevoDrive performed well and ended up being only slightly more expensive than a pair of SF-1200 SSDs. 

The original RevoDrive had an expansion connector on it that was never used. That's where the RevoDrive x2 comes in. You get twice the number of controllers, making the x2 identical in performance to OCZ's recently announced IBIS drive. But without the HSDL interface. Read on for our quick look at OCZ's latest PCIe SSD.

Take two SandForce SF-1200 controllers and put them on a card with a boatload of NAND and a RAID controller. Add some special sauce to keep the price low and you have OCZ's RevoDrive. It'll offer up to twice the performance of a Vertex 2 SSD for only $20 more when it ships in July.

Read on to find out how OCZ did it and how the PCIe SSD stacks up against the best of the best.