

Our latest storage review is impressive because we used a total of 64 PCIe SSDs to test an innovative PCIe-powered enclosure. We blasted away with an arsenal of 32 SanDisk Fusion ioMemory 3.2TB SSDs and 32 Intel DC P3700 NVMe SSDs, which allowed us to push the very limits of SSD RAID.

PCIe SSDs offer the most performance and capacity that a user can attain in a single flash-based device, but they are not without drawbacks. Many users still prefer 2.5" SSDs simply because they can deploy more of them per server. There are a limited number of PCIe slots per server, which restricts the ability to utilize them in the RAID configurations that ensure data safety.

However, there are alternatives that allow users to utilize an impressive number of PCIe SSDs at once, as seen in our review of the One Stop Systems Flash Storage Array 200.

The One Stop System FSA 200 houses up to 32 PCIe SSDs in its 3U enclosure, which connects to host servers via a high-performance PCIe 3.0 connection. This technique provides a blend of high performance and beefy storage capacity, and also gave us a chance to put two massive SSD arrays to the test.

We tested the enclosure with 64 of the fastest PCIe SSDs on the market, and managed to achieve amazing results in a RAID configuration. However, pushing the boundaries of PCIe performance is not always as easy as it seems, so come along to Tom's IT Pro as we push the limits of flash-based storage in our 64 PCIe SSDs, 120TB Of Flash And One Stop Systems: The FSA 200 Review.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's IT Pro, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.

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