Based out of Taiwan and founded in 1989, G.SKILL is best known for their memory products and over the years they?ve sprinkled in some other related products as well. Though they haven't been very prominent in the SSD market ? especially as of late, G.SKILL has remained in the game with yet another Phoenix drive release. They?ve been using the ?Phoenix? appellation on their SSD product names for quite some time and to the best of my memory, the last one we tested was the Phoenix Pro way back in 2010. That particular drive featured the (pre-LSI owned) SandForce SF-1222 controller and operated on a SATA II interface. Now that newly minted SATA II SSDs are a thing of the past and SATA III drives are routinely hitting bandwidth thresholds, we?re seeing more and more PCIe based drives emerge which have plenty of ceiling left to grow. G.SKILL has surprisingly joined the growing PCIe crowd with the Phoenix Blade. The name is likely a reference to the drive's shape, long and thin, and the fact that it carves up data with ease. This time around, they have a on board RAID 0 setup (à la OCZ RevoDrive 350) with four LSI SandForce SF-2281 controllers working in concert to pump out crazy performance like 2000MB/s reads/writes and IOPS of up to 90,000 reads and 245,000 writes. The PCI Express 2.0 x8 slot provides plenty of headroom to let the drive max out without being a bottleneck.