I hate this single minded concentration on throughput. The most important parameter with SSDs is what are the latency figures? Of particular interest is that for writes, especially small random writes (random reads tend to be OK). For many operations it is the random write latency that is the killer.

Also for these type of devices to be usable as system disks it will need BIOS support which all booting from PCI-X slots.

comfortably out of reach of most people

Why?

Disc Controllers can more than handle these speeds?

Infact I would be suprised if this wasn't implemented as a disc controller with an attached disc from the operating systems POV.

If the article is correct about the transfer rates being GBytes/sec rather than GBits/sec, then I think you'll find very few controllers would be able to keep up, and those that do are almost certainly not going to be found as standard on the average home/SOHO motherboard. PCIe slots, on the other hand...

Depending on how it was implemented, it could be bootable from the box. If it presents itself to the system as just another storage controller card, it should be bootable.

That being said, who would use a multi-terabyte drive as a boot volume? :S In my experience, large drives are used for storage of mass data, people like to keep their boot/OS/application volumes separate from their mass data.

"""PCIe ssd should be released in expresscard format as well..."""

Actually there are plenty of expresscard ssds out there, most of which you could probably even boot from. The problem is that the format is too small (and too low power) to fit a decent amount of flash, lots of cache, and a high end storage controller. Plus they aren't any cheaper than 2.5" internal SSDs, so you might as well just slap one of them inside your computer and save that express card slot for something useful. Possibly store paperclips or toothpicks in it...

And for years PCIe motherboards have been able to boot from PCIe storage controllers, but as mentioned, I only see that being useful if the Gamer or Workstation versions have reasonably small capacities. I really hope I don't run into too many morons that think they need that much high speed flash storage to play Farcry 2 or make a youtube mashup.

Yes, as mentioned, random write is the all-important factor in these flash drives. If these PCIe deals are as high quality as they sound, they'll have a fair amount of DDR2 cache, and a battery unit, so you can safely cache writes. I'm not saying that is a perfect solution, but it could at least boost write speeds until the cache filled, and with a proper controller it could make for more efficient writes. A sequential read speed of 250MB/s is great and all, but not when you have to take a 6MB/s random write speed along with it. Which is the only reason I don't own a couple SATA SSDs by now...

Hi, get your terminology right PCI-X is not a PCIe slot.

To be correct...

"PCI-X (PCI eXtended) is a computer bus and expansion card standard that enhances the PCI Local Bus for higher bandwidth demanded by servers. It is a double-wide version of PCI, running at up to four times the clock speed, but is otherwise similar in electrical implementation and uses the same protocol. It has itself been replaced in modern designs by the similar-sounding PCI Express, which features a very different logical design, most notably being a "narrow but fast" serial connection instead of a "wide but slow" parallel connection." - Wikipedia

As you can see from the description above, there is no such technical definition that separates the two by either video card or expansion card. Bottom-line, one is just an older standard for a PCI based system bus.