Introduction

Yesterday we told you about the PhotoFast G-Monster V5 and how the company was able to take a PhotoFast RAID controller and package it with two G-Monster V3 solid state drives all in a single 2.5 inch form factor hard drive. The 256GB drive was very impressive, but its 999 USD price was enough to keep us from jumping up and down with glee. Today we are going to look at another creation from PhotoFast; this time the company has paired four G-Monster V3 drives based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller and matched them with a Promise Technology ST EX8650 SATA/SAS RAID controller that uses a PCIe 8x connector and includes 256MB of DDR2 cache.

Let's be honest, the solid state wars have been very entertaining and it reminds me of the old ATI / NVIDIA days. If you were to compare the new PCIe based G-Monster to a graphics card it would be the mystical card that graced the cover of Maximum PC 10 years ago; the one that was made in Photoshop with a 3DFX, ATI and NVIDIA chipset on it. Not even the X2 series cards that we have today compare to the silliness of the PhotoFast G-Monster - PROMISE PCIe SSD. Honestly, this product is something that was thought up by an engineer in the test lab when his boss was away and he had a box of parts sitting around while playing with a soldering iron. The story might not be entirely accurate, but this is the only way I can envision this product being drawn out.

With a claimed read and write speed of 1000 MB/s, we even dropped a jaw while reading the specifications. PhotoFast released information about the product a couple of months ago and it took a little while for our sample to arrive, but Jason at DVNation always has the cool toys. When he said one was available for testing we jumped at the opportunity to get it in our test lab. Let's have a look.