Have you ever felt that your SSD is too slow, or that you wanted to something more akin to the expensive RAMDISKS of old with a lot more storage space? MSI has a solution for you. Its new PCIE add-in card can fit two M.2 SSDs and merges them together into a single drive through RAID 0, giving you more than 7,000MBps of sustained read and write storage speed.
There are a lot of fast drives out there, but none that can quite meet this sort of specification. Intel has had some gigabyte per second PCIE SSD cards available for a while and Samsung's 960 Pro NVMe SSDs can get up to around 3,500MBps, but what MSI is offering is something quite different.
The add-in card uses up eight lanes of PCIExpress, so you'll need an additional full speed graphics card slot to take advantage of it. In place though, it packs a small cooling fan and metallic cooling shroud for additional heat dissipation. It's the M.2 storage cards that are the really interesting part of it though, as it RAIDs them together and then transfers all of that additional storage speed power right through the PCIE socket.
Ultimately it can deliver up to 7,2000MBps we're told, which is ungodly fast. That should boot up an operating system in mere seconds and leave you with zero loading screens in games. Indeed if you thought those tip messages between levels were lost running on a SATA III SSD, just you wait and see what something like this will do.
There's no pricing or availability information for this new add-in card as of yet. MSI has said for now it only plans to include the card in some of its prebuilt systems. If it proves popular though, that may change in the future.
Image and story source: PCGamer
