Verdict: Up to 44 times quicker than a hard disk

While none of the SSDs in this Labs test are particularly cheap, we thought it would be interesting to test a money-no-object, enterprise-class SSD. The STEC ZeusIOPS, which was developed by British company Baydel, costs more than £7,000 for the 18GB version, so it's certainly a high-end product.

The ZeusIOPS is fast, partly because it uses SLC NAND flash, which is a very high-speed (and therefore expensive) type of flash memory, and also because it has an enormous 512MB buffer. The data in this buffer is not only protected by ECC (error checking and correction), but also by a bank of capacitors that ensures, in the event that the power suddenly cuts out, any data stored in the buffer is written to the flash memory.

The ZeusIOPS uses arbitrated loop Fibre Channel (FC-AL). This fibre-optic interface is rarely found in PCs, as it's more commonly used to connect storage area networks, and provides up to 4Gb/sec of bandwidth. The ZeusIOPS has two FC-AL ports, so it can supply either 200MB/sec using one port, or 400MB/sec in dual-port mode, using suitable software such as Veritas Storage Foundation. This means that if you want to connect the ZeusIOPS to a standard PC, you'll need to buy a FC-AL controller card, such as the excellent QLogic QLE2462 (£919.78 inc VAT from www.zomp.net), which is a 4x PCI-E card.

In addition to the 18GB ZeusIOPS, STEC also produces a 36GB version for £12,050 inc VAT, a 73GB version for £17,275 inc VAT and a 146GB version for a stonking £25,265 inc VAT. As the ZeusIOPS is usually installed in a hot-swappable drive bay, it's fitted with a 40-pin SCA-2 connector, so it needs an adaptor card to fit standard Fibre Channel cables. This means that despite the drive itself being a standard 3.5in device, you'll need either a lot of space behind the drive for the adaptor card, or a free bay above the drive.

The ZeusIOPS was nearly twice as fast as the other flash drives at reading and writing in the HD Tach tests, but lagged behind the two RAM drives, the Gigabyte i-RAM and HyperOs HyperDrive4. However, in the real-world tests, the ZeusIOPS performed superbly, achieving almost identical performance to that of the RAM drives; it scored 1.58 in Paint Shop Pro, and took 32 seconds to load the Far Cry level, and 28 seconds to load our test level in Silent Hunter 4.

Much more telling were the results from Iometer, in which the ZeusIOPS read 64KB blocks almost twice as quickly as the RAM drives, and nearly 1,800 per cent faster than the slowest flash drive, the Apacer AFD II. This is hardly surprising, considering that the ZeusIOPS is optimised for running massive databases.

To further increase the pressure on the drives, we also tested some of them using 4KB blocks. When reading 4KB blocks randomly spread around the drive, the ZeusIOPS proved to be capable of 41,057 IO/sec (input/output operations per second). In comparison, the HyperDrive4 could produce just 11,611 IO/sec, a 15,000rpm Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 FC-AL drive 937 IO/sec and a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor X just 653 IO/sec. This means that you'd need an array of 44 Cheetah 15K.4 drives or 63 Raptor X drives to equal the ZeusIOPS's performance in this test.

Unfortunately, because of the way they're written, Windows and most consumer-level apps are unable to take full advantage of the ZeusIOPS's incredible performance, making the real-world benefits of the ZeusIOPS relatively small.

However, it's still a fantastic product that offers very high data integrity, and it's ludicrously fast at reading and writing small files. It may not be ideally suited to every operation, and it only really shines when running massive databases, but if I already had a Dream PC with dual-graphics cards and a 30in monitor, I'd want a ZeusIOPS.

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