I don't think they did anything to make this look better on benchmarks.... I believe given the price and the size that this is really optimized to be used as an enterprise class product, such as in a database server that has a large amount of memory set aside as cache. This would allow file reads and writes to not be many small files but larger ones that SSD's seem to really like.
Those of you who were ready to "cut a check" until you "saw its real numbers" probably didn't see all if its true real numbers. There is a lot to take into account in how this was tested.
Were all the tests run when this drive was set to boot windows??? Or were some of the tests run with Windows booting off of a different drive and your benchmarks run on it when it wasn't the primary boot drive?? I didn't see you explain that for the tests that you specifically made this the boot drive, loaded Windows and ran all the tests off the drive while it was also serving as Windows boot partition which would have added the overhead of page file swapping and other overhead which could have colored some of the results.
Plus saying no because a few benchmarks were off by a fairly small margin when you get down to it is insane, given that if you were to go out and buy 4 SSD's, you better have a great SATA Raid Controller open and ready to go, and then you have to remember that unless all four are the new Sata6, you would never see these numbers period....
So there are many advantages to what they did with putting this all together on a PCI-E 4x bus... all you actually need to run this is ANY PCI-E slot from a 1x to a 16x and yes I do know what I'm talking about... The 1x would have to be an open ended one as they should be (some board makers don't use the open ended PCI-E slots) but you can run a 4x in a 1x, and you can run a 1x in a 16x.
Believe me... you can do all of the above... All you lose is the extra lanes and corresponding bandwidth. Thats why there is the interface which is the first part before the break in the contacts, and then the second set of contacts which are the bridge to the lanes.
So please know what your talking about before you write it... if you think I'm wrong, see if your board has an open ended 1x slot and plug that video card in there and I bet you it will boot... and run just fine... just don't expect amazing performance....
But back to this product... I think it would be great in an enterprise type of machine used in a small business as a database test server or a Team Foundation server... I think that is where this driver would find a good home.
