As we've noted more than once here before, as NAND Flash technologies evolve, SATA will go the way of the dino. It's not going to happen overnight but like its old, spinning hard drive counterpart, the writing is on the wall. The market needs new higher speed interfaces with lower overhead and more direct attachment to native system interfaces. OCZ has been trying its hand at developing PCI Express-based SSDs in an effort to address this requirement. They've been rolling out all new products like their Revo Drive that we looked at recently and the new device we'll be looking at here today.

The new OCZ IBIS SSD utilizes a proprietary serial interface that the company has coined "HSDL" for High Speed Data Link and it offers up to 20Gb/sec peak bandwidth over an industry standard SAS connector, which is over three times that of next gen 6Gbps SATA technology. Journey on for all the details and a performance profile of a prototype we've been testing here in the lab...