Article by Kevin Lee

PCIe SSDs are getting so big they can almost be mistaken for graphics cards. Take for instance this honking G.Skill Phoenix Blade Series 480GB PCIe SSD. G.Skill boasts its latest over-the-top piece of flash storage will deliver sequential read and write speeds up to 2,000 MB/s.

Of course, when you break down that down to continuous speeds, the 480GB SSD will write at about 1,050 Mb/s and read at around 1,900 MB/s. Still, that’s still double the write speed found on a fast SATA SSD like the Samsung 840 EVO, which boasts sustained read and write speeds of 515 MB/s and 503 MB/s, respectively.

The G.Skill drive can also read random 4KB blocks of data at a rate of 90,000 IOPS. 4KB Random Writes, meanwhile, go all the way up to 245,000 IOPS.

G.Skill explains that the Phoenix Blade can deliver these extreme speeds because it is equipped with four LSI SF-2281 SSD controllers, each of which is linked to a 120GB MLC flash module. The whole thing is also slapped into a RAID 0 array, whose speeds are turbocharged again with the PCI-express port.

The trade-off for all that speed, of course, is price. A 500GB Samsung EVO is only $230. G.Skill Phoenix Blade Series 480GB PCIe SSD is set to be available starting next week on NewEgg for $699 with an included three-year warranty.