HotHardare has published an article called 'Fusion-io vs Intel X25-M SSD RAID, Grudge Match', a battle royal of what is arguably some of the fastest SSD storage technology money can buy right now. Here'sa taster:

So, what have we learned here today? First, there is little question that RAID 0 performance with Intel's X25-M SSD is ever-more impressive than a single drive installation, as we expected. That said, at least from a cost/performance ratio perspective, the sweet spot seems to be a two drive RAID 0 setup, which offers about 80% if the performance of a four drive array in terms of read performance but perhaps not as much in terms of write intensive operations. Then of course there is the practicality of a four drive RAID 0 setup, which invokes four points of possible failure in the event an SSD should go bad. Obviously this isn't the sort of setup you should store critical files on, though the reliability of Intel's X25-M SSD has been solid and as an OS and application volume, its not quite as risky as it appears on the surface. Alternatively, we'd advise a strong hardware RAID controller solution behind it and a RAID 5 setup, if a quad-SSD array is your goal.

For Fusion-io's ioDrive, our enthusiasm for its ridiculously fast technology is only tempered by its price point. What's most impressive about the ioDrive is that it is capable of delivering seemingly red-lined performance in both read and write intensive workloads and as you pile on concurrent IO requests, the little half-height PCIe card just sucks them up and spits them back at you faster. Not only does Fusion-io's SSD technology circumvent the looming SATA bottleneck, but it also accommodates for some of the intrinsic limitations of the current generation of NAND Flash technology, which in our humble opinion, is without question a game changer.

When we embarked on our initial benchmarking efforts with the products and test system setups in this article, we were going in with the thought process of showing you what Fusion-io's ioDrive can do and also an alternative SSD setup with Intel's SSD, that costs a lot less than Fusion-io's enterprise-class technology. However, as we ripped through each pass of our various test suites, it became apparent that in reality here, we were comparing apples and oranges (though we hate to use that cliche'). Currently the 160GB ioDrive we tested lists for $7200. Obviously this is not a product targeted for even the highest enthusiast desktop end user but rather an enterprise-level SAN (Storage Area Network) box, database or file server. That said, as we also eluded to the notion that what Fusion-io has here with their io-Drive technology capitalizes so well on the disruptive nature of NAND Flash, that it could very well become a disruptive technology in and of itself.