 This changes everything. It's kind of like this product in that respect. It changes everything. Again, SSD technology is moving so fast that it's almost impossible to keep up with it. So we started out with simple SSDs, 2.5 inch drives, and honestly, you know what? Performance wasn't great. It wasn't even really, in a lot of situations, as good as a traditional mechanical hard drive. So that's where we started. Then we got high performance SSDs when Intel released their X25 series, Indolinks released their Barefoot controller, and all of a sudden SSDs, whoa, now they're affordable. Now they're way faster than a hard drive. Then, from there, we got even higher performance SSDs. And now with the Sanforce controller, the Intel Gen2 controller, as well as Crucial's latest controller, we're running into the limits of the SATA 3 gigabit per second interface. Now Crucial doesn't worry about that so much, because their SSD actually uses SATA 6 gigabit per second, but SATA 6 gigabit per second isn't even really mainstream yet, and not everybody has a controller for that. So, some companies are coming out with some innovative solutions, including OCZ, with their Revo Drive series of SSDs, where they actually use a PCI Express interface to plug an SSD directly into your motherboard, but there's also another way. So check this out. This is the IBIS or IBIS. I actually don't know how to say it. I'm not going to worry too much about it, because the name is not the cool thing. The cool thing is this card right here, because the SSD isn't even, well, it's neat, but it's not quite that neat. And this is what's important about it, right there. So SATA, there you go. So SATA is, what are they saying? 1.5, no, they're saying it's what, 3 gigabit per second? Okay, and then SAS. SAS is up to about 6 gigabit per second right now, HSDL. So that is, I think it stands for High Speed Data Link or something like that. Anyway, this is capable of almost 20, 20 gigabit per second. So that means that we can take four SanForce controllers. Remember, SanForce controller is almost able to max out a SATA 3 gigabit per second connection. We can take up to four of those at a time, plug them in with the HSDL cable directly into our HSDL card, and we can get just unheard of performance. So let's go ahead and open up the box on OCZ's cutting edge High Speed Data Link, hey, I got it right, interface, and it is the answer to the SATA bottleneck and the driving force behind the IBIS SSD. So the SSD runs off of internal RAID 0. So that's how they're able to take four controllers. So that is four SanForce controllers. They put them all together. Let me just see if I can get this opened up here. My SSD is faster than your hard drive. Darn right it is. This SSD is faster than a good number of hard drives together, I'll tell you that much. So there it is. That is the IBIS HSDL 3.5-inch solid state drive. So you can see on the side, we have your standard 3.5-inch mounting holes. This is your standard 3.5-inch form factor. We have your standard 3.5-inch mounting holes on the back, on the bottom rather. Standard 3.5-inch mounting holes on the other side. We have a QC pass, so that means that it did pass the QC. And on the back we have a standard, oh, we have a standard bloody well nothing actually. No, we do actually. We have a standard SATA power, okay, so you can actually power this with your normal power supply. And then we have an HSDL connection right there. So it actually looks kind of like an SFF 8087 cable. In fact, I think it uses one, but that's definitely like not, that's a non-standard pin out for sure. Okay, so you plug that baby right in there. That's nice. And that is the equivalent of several SATA 6 gigabit per second connections. So you go ahead, it comes with a nice little sleeved cable here. You can see the individual wires inside there. They're kind of silvery and look all nice. Okay. And then you go ahead and plug that guy into this little card right here. And this is where the magic happens, because this card is a controller card. Now you can buy an IDE controller, you can buy a SATA controller, you can buy a SAS controller. Or if you want to, oh, I dropped it. Wow. Okay. Or if you want to have the most cutting edge performance possible, you can buy this controller. So here it is. It looks real simple, doesn't it? Basically, what they're doing is they're taking a PCI Express 4X interface, they're using the simplest possible card, as you can clearly see, to deliver as much of that performance as possible directly into your SSD drive. So you just go ahead, remove the little stopper right there. The stopper, you unplug the top of the bottom. That unleashes the power. The power. So you go ahead, use one of your PCI Express 4X or higher. Remember, you can plug this into an 8X or a 16X connector on your motherboard. Plug that in like that, run that drive wherever the heck you feel like it, and boom! You have performance that is untouchable with any other solution on the market at this time, and probably for a while. Although the way SSD performance is increasing, like every time you stop and take a breath, who knows what is coming down the line. Now I just want to see the overall specs. Nice. So max performance reads up to 740 MB per second, with writes up to 690 MB per second, and with up to 100,000 4K random write IOPS. Holy smokes. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the OCC, IBIS, IBIS, hopefully someone can correct me on that, as well as their HSDL interface card. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.