It's an extensible interface which is great for servers which have more slots for hard drives than they have PCI slot space. This is not a consumer solution. Basically they are just pulling the PCI-Express signal from the slot and pushing it over the wiring, where each SSD has a PCI-E to SATA RAID chip that address' two Sandforce controllers. It's clever and simple to use off the shelf parts but building their own IC would reduce latency and remove some cost of the chips used. and frankly Lightpeek would be better suited to it as well since they are limited to very high quality cabling only. Ideally the design should be: Code: -----> lightpeak interface (fast, high bandwidth cable) ---> lightpeak demux to NAND chip PCI-E x8/16 interface -----> Mega-channel NAND controller chip -----> -----> This way the central controller chip can manage the whole array and include features like online RAID expansion and migration, as well as hot-spare and total CRC/ECC etc, but it would need to be a customised beast. Right now, OCZ's design is much simpler, but it works.
