We'll be testing the GSKILL Phoenix Blade PCIe SSD today. Let me just quickly throw some numbers at you that will bring a smile to your face, so how does 2,000 MB/s maximum read and write performance sound? Yes Sir, or 245K IOPS? Yep - that's the kind of performance GSKILL offers to the performance aficionados in the year 2014.

The world of Solid State storage technology is full of surprises and the development rate is exceedingly progressive. Last year it however turned from a growth market towards a steady market where only the big players have a real saying. Names like Micron (Crucial), Samsung, Intel and Toshiba (OCZ) will be the brands to keep an eye on. The development rate however has been going so fast that current component technology cannot keep up with the pace. The transition to SATA 3 (6G) was huge, but the minute SATA 3 was released (offering 6 Gbps transfers) these controllers already started reaching their maximum bandwidth with the latest generation SSDs. Starting with Z97 you'll be seeing a lot of M2 products, basically offering a 10 Gbps link directly from your chipset (PCIe) and later on in the year 10 Gbps Sata Express will become a thing of discussion. So basically you will see three things trending this year, slightly faster SSDs (but these are bottlenecked due to SATA3), then you'll see the M2 devices (these will become very popular due to ease of installation versus performance), and the last trend will be a series of new PCI Express based SSD solutions. Recently we tested a couple already like the OCZ RevoDrive series, Plextor, MX-Extreme all fun stuff.