Solid State Drives got their name from the fact that they have no mechanical components but instead use NAND flash memory chips. Fusion-IO takes the SSD concept to a whole new level with its ioDrive which looks more like a RAM drive and instead of SATA or PATA it uses PCI Express x4. The card has SLC NAND flash memory circuits and through the PCIe interface it is able to reach new heights of I/O performance, much higher than any SATA SSD. Fusion-IO calls ioDrive the world’s fastest Solid State Drive and we can’t imagine there will be any complaints about the performance.
The card can be had with either 80GB or 160GB storage and a magnificent 800MB/s read speed (about 4 times as fast as the fastest SATA SSD on the retail market) and 680MB/s write speed. The market they are targeting are perhaps more interested in the 100,000 random IOPS the drive can handle.
Fusio-IO ioDrive is available at DVNation and the prices are about $2,649 and $4,899 for the 160GB model. In other words, nothing for us mortals.
There are some limitations though, it only works in 64-bit environments and you can’t boot from it. The latter will be fixed in a future firmware update slated for the fourth quarter.
“People experienced in the field of SSD will note that performance of an SSD can vary depending on the controller you plug it into (such as Intel Matrix, or the controller found on an nVidia chipset motherboard), but the ioDrive IS its own controller…and drive, yielding high performance regardless of the system you plug it into.”
DVNation has published a review of ioDrive and the benchmarks truly shows that Fusion-IO has done a lot of things right here.
