Introduction

Several years ago I reviewed motherboards and video cards. At the time NVIDIA was still a major player in the motherboard market and with each new release they stressed the number of PCI Express lanes their latest and greatest chipset had available. They made it very clear that the future of computing would ride the PCI Express highway. If NVIDIA wouldn't have been pushed out of the chipset business, how many PCIe lanes would we be up to today?

At their technological peak of chipsets the nForce Professional 3600 MCP paired with a 3050 chip produced 56 PCIe lanes. The X58, the last true enthusiast class chipset produced by Intel gave us a staggering number of...36 PCIe lanes. One company knew where all of these amazingly fast interconnects were headed and the other wasn't ready to drive in the fast lane. The end result has been poorly implemented USB 3.0 that can't even achieve maximum performance and a roadblock on the number of available SATA III ports.

Intel hasn't been the only massive company to drop the ball with emerging technology, though. For at least two years solid state drives have been an area of rapid growth. No other technology has increased user experience or productivity in the last ten years like what has become our 200 Dollar, 128GB SSD. For years we went through cycles of adding more RAM and faster processors while our 50 year old traditional HDD design gained a few megabytes per second of performance. The HDD let us down with slow growth and moderate performance gains. A revolving digital image of an hourglass became the symbol of the storage product market's failure.

It isn't every day that I get to start off an article with a benchmark. The benchmark scores above are from an OCZ Technology RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB after a clean wipe from the latest OCZ Tool. The performance is so amazing that I can't really put it into words without pulling out the Four Letter Adjective Handbook and place three or four of those words in front of YEAH! - The problem is you're not going to see that level of performance in the real world until Microsoft delivers TRIM commands that can pass through RAID controllers or OCZ's new VCA 2.0.