Take into account that 1GB/s PCIe SSD system from Angelbird we covered a year ago? Well, the corporate just tell us it’s finally available. The performance claims are more modest than we saw within the beta phase, but we are not distraught: the recent benchmark is 800MB/s reads and 750MB/s writes, achieved with a $3000 setup including four 240GB SSD modules mounted on a Wings PCI-e card with a 32GB SSD built-in. Should hold something back for groceries? You can not reduce the selection of SSDs without slowing everything down, but four 60GB drives at the cheapest Wings Lite PCIe card should satisfy most thrill seekers for slightly below a grand. We are hoping Smart Modular is being attentive.
Angelbird, the brand new European company specialised in high-performance and coffee cost technologies, announces its cross platform Wings PCIe card, designed for RAID setups, featuring upgradable performance in data, design and audio-video applications, sought by professionals and enthusiasts alike.
Also announced are Crest Solid State Drives (SSD) in capacities of 60GB, 115GB, and 240GB.
Wings is a PCIe x4 card equally at home in a Windows or Mac OS X environment. Although not officially supported, Wings also works out of the box with Linux and FreeBSD. It may possibly boot and group RAID arrays of SATA2 drives with I/O rates within the range of 3GB/s or more when using multiple cards, the sole limit being the motherboard’s available slots. RAID arrays could be spread across multiple Wings cards, hosting as much as four drives each, that may be associated with obtain outstanding performance with the added bonus of getting the likelihood to distribute such performance over an increasable space for storing by adding more drives.
Each Wings card can host the Angelbird’s own Crest SSD Expansion Cartridges, or simply any commercial 2.5″ SSD or HDD.
For optimal airflow and thinness of the cardboard, the corporate recommends using their very own Cartridges. The corporate also designed the slide-in couplers used to connect new Cartridges or any regular 2.5″ form factor drive quite simply.
A Wings RAID array is the proper solution for design or audio-video professionals who’re constantly moving large files around. For server applications a caching area may be assigned for transaction files, temporary database files and often accessed tables. Massive improvements in server response time may be achieved.
Crest SSD Cartridges and SSD units are equipped with SF-1222 SSD Processors from SandForce®, the pre-eminent innovator and leader of SSD technology.
Starting with Wings Lite at $249 for a basic four slot PCIe card, higher end models include a handy extra onboard 16GB or 32GB drive which might be used for graphical boot loaders to control multiple operating systems, or to store a whole operating system image separately from the information volumes. Upgradeability, scalability and versatility are key benefits. From individual power user to very large scale corporate networking, Wings is the SSD RAID solution that sets the humble.
Davide Rutigliano, inventor and CEO, said:
“Bringing Wings to market have been an exhilarating challenge and a triumph for the Angelbird development team. Very respectable amounts of performance are actually available at a totally affordable price being able to upgrade easily to an ultimate cutting edge solution”
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