Fusion-io Preps PCI-Express Based ioXtreme Solid State Drive

[malware]

Fusion-io, a company that's famous for its server SSD solutions, unveiled today at the E for All conference and expo its first consumer product, the ioXtreme. ioXtreme represents a PCI-Express based solid state drive with a capacity of 80GB. Fusion-IO promises that the ioXtreme PCI-E SSD card will be 20x faster than traditional hard drives and about 5x times faster than mainstream SSDs. In terms of transfer speeds it will be able to hit a data throughput of 500MB/s to 700MB/s. When released ioXtreme will power the world's fastest supercomputers and workstations.
"Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, unzipping and manipulating massive files even installing a new application-all at the same time," said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. "Suddenly, with the ioXtreme, tasks that would have brought your system to its knees are no longer limited by the disks spinning loudly inside your box."
The ioXtreme will be priced at under $1000 and be available for home and consumer use in Q1, 2009.

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[Error 404]

Will this be based on PCI-E 16x or 1x slot? It would definately be useful on workstations and for photo/video editing (and high end gaming).

 

[jyoung75]

Finally, this is EXACTLY what I have been waiting for from Fusionio - a bootable Windows 64bit PCIe SSD drive that drastically outperforms any SSD out there. Here's a product spec sheet which compares it's enterprise brother's performance to Intel, MTRON, and Samsung SSDs. http://fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion specsheet_v16.pdf. Notice how this totally outclasses Intel, MTRON, and any other SSD out there. DVNation found similar juicy results http://www.dvnation.com/Fusion-IO-IO...Review-p4.html.

Pricing under $1000 for the 80BG drive (~$10-12/GB) is not bad considering it would take 6 MTRON drives in a raid 0 array with a VERY high-end Areca controller to obtain these results (which would cost you about triple that amount).

 

[Deleted member 3]

Will this be based on PCI-E 16x or 1x slot? It would definately be useful on workstations and for photo/video editing (and high end gaming).

"In terms of transfer speeds it will be able to hit a data throughput of 500MB/s to 700MB/s."

PCI-e x4 according to those speeds.

 

[MilkyWay]

okay i know what the idea is, that pci ex is faster than sata but what i want to know is do solid state drives currently max out sata to the need for pci ex drives?

 

[DaMulta]

Can you get more than one and raid 0 them?

 

[blobster21]

Can you get more than one and raid 0 them?

mostly depends if the card interfacing these SSD drives with the rest of the PCI-E architecture is capable of doing RAID

 

[nemesis.ie]

I notice on the spec sheet the 320GB MLC version, I would sacrifice some of the lifetime (20 years still seems fine) and 100MB/sec of write performance if that one comes in at a substantially better price ...... 320GB would be enough for OS, apps and some games and you can still have a 1TB or whatever HDD to store media/backups etc.

Being PCI-E you don't need to worry about more than one driver persumably - ever - when moving from machine to machine - buy now and it might do for your (high speed) storage needs for 5 years or maybe more ...

 

[Swansen]

okay i know what the idea is, that pci ex is faster than sata but what i want to know is do solid state drives currently max out sata to the need for pci ex drives?

pretty much what i was thinking, i'm guessing there not even close.

 

[peach1971]

what i want to know is do solid state drives currently max out sata to the need for pci ex drives?

Yes, because it´s exceeding 300 MB/s.
But: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata#SATA_6.0_Gbit.2Fs

 

[Darkrealms]

Yes, because it´s exceeding 300 MB/s.
But: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata#SATA_6.0_Gbit.2Fs

Thanks for the link. According to this SATA 3.0 is going to be 6Gb/Sec so this may not be a lasting thing anyway (end user). I think it is great for OS while regular data is left to current standard drives. 2¢

 

[Derick650]

What’s funny is SATA drives go through the PCI bus too; they just go through a disk controller to get to the system bus. This new SSD drive appears to cut out this go-between and gets the drive closer to the CPU by putting it directly on the 10Gb/s PCIe (x4) system bus.

I think the real difference between this ioXtreme SSD and other SSD’s I’ve looked at is the sustained random read and write performance. Just look at Intel's SATA based SSD. It can achieve bursts of 170 MB/s sequential writes and roughly 3,300 write IOPS. That's incredible performance compared to many hard drives but this ioXtreme appears to be magnitudes beyond even Intel's SSD when doing random reads or writes, not sequential, and whole lot faster than anything else I’ve seen.

If it lives up to the claims, then nothing else can touch it, not even 6.0 Gb/s SATA and I’ll definitely want one.