Fusion IO announces monster SSD for gamers

Fusion IO, which has made a name for itself with high-performance SSDs for the enterprise segment, preps its first consumer SSD – which promises to be more than twice as fast as the fastest SSDs on the market today. Prosumers, enthusiasts and gamers will be able to benefit from the massive bandwidth of the card, Fusion IO says.


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NAND-flash based solid state disks (SSDs) are considered to be the best choice for PCs that rely on low power consumption and especially are focused on high performance applications. However, even the fastest SSDs you can buy today are limited by the bandwidth of SATA II (300 MB/s) and typically achieve read speeds of up to 200 – 250 MB/s on the high end – which would include Intel’s recently announced 80 GB SSDs that sell for $595.

If it is performance you are looking for and if you have a few extra dollars to spend, you may want to wait for Fusion IO’s 80 GB ioXtreme card, which is scheduled to become available in Q1 of next year for “less than $1000”. Fusion IO CTO David Flynn told TG Daily that the PCI Express card will be able to hit a data throughput of 500 MB/s to 700 MB/s. Latency is increased by a factor of between 10-100, which in combination with the bandwidth provides about 50,000 IO’s per second. In low-level benchmarks, Fusion Io promises that its card will outpace traditional hard drives by a factor of more than 20x and mainstream SSDs by about 5x.

Flynn mentioned that professional CAD/CAM users, software developers and enthusiasts will be able to benefit from the extra bandwidth of the card. For example, The Linux kernel can be compiled twice as fast with the card and gamers can accelerate the load times of game levels. Another small, but important advantage is that users can keep their hard drives as mass storage devices, since the Fusion IO card plugs into a PCI Express interface.

The extra speed is pitched as ideal for particularly disk-heavy tasks such as compiling code, content editing or large games.

The card is still in the development stage and hasn't received its official operating system support or complete technical details. Fusion-io plans to release the ioExtreme in early 2009 and is targeting a price below $1,000, putting it in the same price range as high-end traditional but slower SSDs

Next Generation Server Storage

Designed around a revolutionary silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory, the ioDrive is the world’s most advanced NAND clustering technology with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today's hard disks — giving you the power to improve both memory capacity and storage performance by up to one thousand times. The ioDrive dramatically increases performance such that every server can easily contain the I/O performance of the world's fastest enterprise SAN.

• Capable of over 120,000 random read/write IOPS
• Allows for less than 50 microsecond access latency
• Permits user to Host and Serve 10x the content per server
• Enables terabytes of Virtual Memory with near DRAM speeds
• Eliminates service interrupts due to I/O contention
• Save or resume virtual machine states in seconds