640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated

Lisandro writes "TG Daily reports that the company Fusion io has presented a massively fast, massively large solid-state flash hard drive on a PCIe card at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego. Fusion is promising sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading and 600Mb/sec for writing. The company plans to start releasing the cards at 80 GB and will scale to 320 and 640 GB. '[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. "That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive," said Flynn. The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later.'"

And another question.

[AltGrendel]

What's the MTBF? [wikipedia.org]

Re:Oblig.

[ady1]

Its not the size of the harddrive which is amazing. Its the read/write speed.
Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.

$30 per gb, ouch

[dnamaners]

Its fast, but not as fast as I would have hopped with parallel access. They better get the speed up or the cost down to hit it big. Right now I'd take either direction, as they both have decent applications. Good progress though, time will tell.

Re:Still Expensive

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I hope this means that laptops and large capacate media players with extremely long battery life are not too far away.

I think people expect too much from SSDs. The hard drive is far from the dominant power consumption component in a notebook. The CPU, chipset, GPU and display panel each consume more power than a notebook hard drive does. If you follow a modified version of Amdahl's law (not a law, but whatever), you want to fix the biggest problem first, and that is either the display or CPU. An LED backlit display can save some power, and running a lower power rating CPU saves power too. Compared to that, the savings of swapping HDD for SSD is negligible. On a standard notebook, I think you might add 15 minutes to battery life, which is still far from "extremely long battery life".

In media players, doubling in capacity every year is a reasonable expectation.

Gb or GB???

[saleenS281]

You would think being a "geek" new site, one could at least get their GB's and Gb's correct. If the drive is running at 800Mb a second, that's hardly what I would call *impressive* or *extremely fast*. That's not even as fast as most 10k rpm scsi or sata drives.

I'm also wondering how one would make the jump from 800Mb to 1GB... that would be quite the feat. I'm guessing that the B's are screwed up somewhere... it's just sad that something so glaringly wrong can be posted to a site like this...

Re:Uhh, Price?

[CastrTroy]

I could buy a 10 GB drive for most of my OS and software, and just keep my media on a traditional hard drive. You don't need a super fast drive for your MP3s and Videos, but it would be nice to increase boot times as well as application start up times.

Re:Wow

[HarvardAce]

You are likely to be eaten by a gnome.

Re:Oblig.

[walt-sjc]

True, you have a lot more RAM now than you used to... BUT, you are also not running DOS anymore. Hell, MS Office alone take 256M just to load Word (I KID...) But seriously, modern apps are huge. Because memory is cheap, apps are not efficient. We also use our systems differently, working with massive files (images, movies, music) and tend to run lots of apps at the same time, including virtual machines. Yes, you can still run windows in 512M, but it seems that even 2G isn't enough at times.

So we still need swap.

Re:Uhh, Price?

[walt-sjc]

Um dude? He is quoting the FA. It's pretty clear that this drive will release at prices closer to $30/G. Maybe next year they can get down to $8...

Re:Oblig.

[HTH NE1]

640gb ought to be enough for anybody.

What's a gram-bit?

Re:write limit?

[Lord Ender]

That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with /dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?

Yes but....

[Kildjean]

They are going to sell it at $30/per GB. Now lets do the math: 649GB * $30 = $19470....

With that amount of money I buy a Mac Pro with 8 Cores and a 1Tb Raid or a 1TB San.... I think Solid State has to grow cheaper before we consumers can jump the gun at it... but, like hard drives back when they made the jump to GB, it will be awesome to see SolidState HD in systems, better then the clunky magnetic disks we currently use...

Even for a corporation telling them a 649Gb Solution is going to cost them $20K they will flip you for it.

Re:Misleading benchmark

[stonecypher]

"[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario.."

By which he means, set up a completely unrealistic benchmark which shows his flash drive in the best possible light, and a traditional drive in the worst possible light.

No, the scenario he set up is a classic worst case scenario for drives, one which is well known to large disk usage corporations: near-random access by hundreds-or-thousands of concurrent users. This is what SANs are built to address, this is what parallel RAID is so good at, and yes, it so happens that this new drive is also good for it, because there's no seek time.

Just because they've successfully approached a real problem doesn't mean that describing the real problem is flimsy propoganda. Knee-jerk reactions don't happen because you're a knee.

800MB/s and 600MB/s NOT b/s

[master811]

I hate to nitpick but the TFR uses MB/s not Mb/s, remember there is 8x DIFFERENCE between the two, otherwise 800Mb/s sounds a lot less impressive (its pretty much the same as current raid-0 (ish)