LSI WarpDrive 300GB – Introduction

In the eight years Legit Reviews has been in existence, the LSI 300GB WarpDrive PCI-E SSD is the most expensive piece of hardware we’ve received to review. With an $11,500 suggested retail price and a $7,500 street price tag at a few online retailers, this isn’t an SSD even hardcore enthusiasts will be picking up. That’s to be expected as the WarpDrive SLP-300 is intended for enterprise applications for which LSI makes a range of products.

Featuring six SandForce SF-1500 controllers, LSI’s own SAS8000 RAID controller, and gobs of SLC NAND, it’s easy to see how the price grew to about half the price of a small automobile. All of that hardware affords performance of up to 240K 4K Read IOPs and 200K 4K Write IOPs which is pretty incredible.

LSI WarpDrive Features

• 300GB storage
• PCI Express 2.0 host interface
• ECC protection up to 24 bits per 512 bytes
• LSISAS2008 Controller
• Powered entirely by the PCIe slot, consumes <25 Watts
• Small form factor PCI Express board-level solid state storage
• Low latency, minimal CPU burden and host memory footprint
• Performance optimized for reads/writes
• Simpler integration using SAS infrastructure
• Enterprise reliability
• Plug-and-play
• No external power requirement
• Support from proven technology leaders
• Bootable
• Supports Windows and Linux operating systems

LSI WarpDrive Benefits

• Up to 240K 4K Read IOPs
• Up to 200K 4K Write IOPs
• Average latency of less than 50 microseconds
• Low host burden – No static CPU and memory overhead
• Software optimized for SSD performance

The WarpDrive’s closest consumer level competitor is the OCZ RevoDrive X2 which features four of the SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a RAID 0 array and MLC NAND. The WarpDrive has a much more compact design to accommodate narrow server racks in a datacenter.

The 98 pin PCI-E connector is much longer on the WarpDrive than we see on the RevoDrive X2 as it supports x8 lane bandwidth which is more than ample for the speed of the drive.

Installing the WarpDrive requires the loading of drivers at the point of Windows installation and included in the box is a disc with all of the drivers you could need along with documentation, etc. This is similar to all other PCI-E based SSDs we’ve used.

Let’s have a little closer look.