When it comes time to hunt down the ultimate in storage performance, you simply cannot settle for standard SSDs. Instead, look to PCI Express-based drives that circumvent the limitations of SATA. We have products from Fusion-io, LSI, and OCZ on the bench.

With the market for solid-state drives continually expanding, we wanted to explore some of the most popular tweaks enthusiasts use to purportedly improve performance and free up capacity. We break out the benchmarks and put them to the test.

Intel plans to offering its SSD caching functionality on the upcoming Z68 platform, and only that platform. HighPoint’s RocketHybrid solution claims to achieve the same functionality, and it’s available as a PCI Express add-in card for only £48.

We repeat our extreme SSD RAID project for the third time and arrange 16 Samsung 470-series SSDs based on MLC NAND in a RAID 0 array to reach new levels of performance. We weren't as fortunate this time, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

RAID arrays with dozens of hard drives are not uncommon for reaching certain performance levels. We demonstrate how beautifully SSD RAID arrays can scale. There may come a time when a few flash-based drives will replace entire farms of hard disks.

The third generation of USB is faster than ever before, but how noticeable is the difference in practice?

Solid state drives can deliver exceptional performance, but they're not necessarily fire-and-forget upgrades. You'll only really get the best possible experience from them if you pay attention to details like TRIM support and available firmware updates.

It only takes one or two modern SSDs to outperform business-class RAID arrays with four or eight hard drives. We're running a full comparison and looking at the implications for high-performance systems when you make the transition to flash-based tech.

Samsung is targeting PC gamers with its ultra-cool 256 GB SSD.