If you have been around the computer scene for any length of time you might remember one of the first SSDs out. It was a product that used DDR RAM and ran through a normal SATA port.

DDRdrive LLC, has decided to revisit some of that older technology, but this time instead of using the SATA port they are using a PCI-e X1 connection and they are also using a combination of NAND and DDR Memory.

The new product, called DDRdrive X1 can hit an amazing 300,000+ IOPs and seems perfect for I/O intensive tasks. It is not the greatest performer in read/write speed though; as it can only hit a peak of 250 MB/s read and 150MB/s in writes.

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The DDRdrive X1 is a PCIe Gen 1-based hybrid SSD, that combines 4 GB of DDR memory and 4 GB of NAND flash memory. Both solid-state technologies work in concert to provide the superior characteristics of DRAM (speed, reliability, and longevity) with the NAND part used for backups. In terms of read/write speeds, the DDRdrive X1 is not that spectacular. Limited by the PCIe x1 interface it can "only" do about 250 MB/s in reads and 155 MB/s in writes. But it's the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), where X1 really shines. A single drive can hit 300,000+ IOPS Random 512B Reads and 200,000+ IOPS Random 512B Writes. That's a massive bump in operation speed compared to practically all other solid-state drives currently in production. For comparison Fusion IO's enterprise drives are estimated at 200,000 IOPS 512B read, while other consumer SSDs are rated at about 100,000 IOPS 512B read.