Fusion-io launches the ioDrive – 640GB PCIe Hard Drive
October 5th, 2007
Fusion-io have lauched a new hard drive, which is seen as an alternative to current ones.
It is based on a “revolutionary” silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory, improves storage performance by a “thousand fold” while simultaneously providing sustained, random access rates “hundreds of times faster” than the industry’s fastest storage devices.
It slots into a PCIe slot on your PC and has some impressive specs including 800MB/sec read speed, 600MB/sec write speed, and 100,000 IOPS (input/output per second) per PCIe x4 card.
The iodrives will be available later in the year in 80GB, 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities, and will retail for around $30 (about £15) per GB.
via PC Launches
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$19,200 for a 640 Gb Hard Drive… bet the US Govt is gonna be ordering hundreds of those!
That means that the 640GB will be around $19,000. EPIC FAILURE.
This is a enterprise servers dream storage device, this should speed up database access by a HUGE amount. And that my friends is something that fortune 500 companies care about a lot more then such a small number as $19,000.
Comments 2 and 3 are pretty short sighted. First I’m sure that there is a small but profitable market for ultra high performance storage of this type – random access hundreds of times better than current devices? I’ll bet there are plenty of server admins or database programmers who would love have one of these. Especially when a server may not need more than 40-50gb of storage, but needs extremely fast access times.
the point is the speed. Thats a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot faster then anything currently out. If what they say is true, then many businesses would gladly pay that much for for a speed that fast. Sides, give it two years it’ll probably 30 cents per gig. You see little children, when something first comes out, it can be horridly expensive, to the point where only the incredibly rich can afford it. but then the people making it, who wish to sell more of their invention, design ways to make it cheaper, so that the rest of us can afford it. This has happened with almost every invention, so you can bet that if they have actually made a hard drive that works that fast, the price will drop.
Price gouging. $20,000 for 97 cents worth of parts.
All technology starts out expensive. Look how much a 16MB hard drive use to be
Let’s hope that is a typo…maybe $3 per gigabyte? That’s still rough, but maybe it’ll drop with mass production- drop from $30 is not gonna work…
You really aren’t taking into account the more specialized uses of such a drive. It may not be reasonable for the average John Doe, but for applications that require rapid data transfer or backup, this will be great. I bet it takes off unless someone else can build it for cheaper.
are you people idiots? These are going to sell very well to anyone that has database intensive servers(any forum server with a lot of traffic), consumers are not the intended market, it is intended for applications where RAM is too expensive, and HDDs are too slow
While that is some really cool technology, I can’t imagine any application that could possibly make spending that kind of money on storage worthwhile!
I think it’s a pretty exciting prospect. Hard Disk Drives have been around for a long time and they seem to have reached the end of their tether concerning performance (as opposed to capacity). Although these things are £15 per GB at the moment they are in the very early stages of product evoloution and I’m sure the price will eventually drop to much more affordable levels. I’m sure HDDs were really expensive when they were first released but look at them now – £120 for 500GB.
this exists for months… where is the news? gigabyte sells this to use with common ram memory . and at prices people can buy.
bye
OMG I can’t believe what I’m reading from the other comments so far! This is an excellent advance! Of course it’s EXPENSIVE! It’s a new technology, that has only just been launched! I for one am excited about this, and can’t wait to get my hands on one… (in 3 years when they are down around £1/GB)
I for one can see the potential in the micro-laptop market.
Surely you can gather that they will eventually be mass manufactured, and will be a consumer standard, rather than an expensive luxury!
5 years from now it will be as $1 per GB; thing i notice about solid state stuff is when it goes, it goes for good, there never seems to be a recovery route it simply falls apart; it would be interesting to raid them
These things will sell easily, I paid 19k for 10tb slow i/o 3 years ago (nexsan atabeast). You buy kit for purpose, high speed i/o is always, always required in datacenters.
Hell one day they will be onboard devices god knows everything else is these days.
To those who think there is no market for this, think again. Every single company that runs oracle will drop no less then 500k on these the week they come out.
this is a big step for system memory. when it comes to technology… price doesnt beat preformance. this is a revolutionary product and it should drive the memory/storage market to an all time high. and if you dont believe that, then think of it this way: if they never came out with this technology, then there would be no benchmark… there would be nothing to beat, and the expasion of new everyday cutting egde products, would come to an end.
In order to clarify this, the chips will cost around $27.83/GB for manufacturing the device. However the price they charge consumers will be vastly less than that. Otherwise they won’t really sell too many. I mean, the speed is great, but it isn’t practical unless you have more than 3 PCI slots for input. I can understand on a Server, which has no need for extra peripherals like a desktop, however that price is FAR too high to charge for just this much storage, despite the write and read speed. Meh, our brain has a read speed of close to 15TF, why not integrate a storage slot into our brain?
BUT IS IT STABLE? Whats the MTBF rating on this puppy? Time to start hijacking truck shipments of these badboys!!!!
It seems to me that there will likely be ways to combine the best of both uses of these very high speed cards and your terrabyte hard drives.
The price will come down. I paid $1,800 for a 10 meg hd for an Apple II in about 1980-81.
See….. here’s the thing. It may be a lot more expensive that a HDD, but still, for speeds even comparable to RAM speeds and for around 10 bucks cheaper per gig. Bigger companies and servers would love to have some of this stuff.
Hell, I’d love to have some.
Damn this is a great idea I can’t wait to see this available to buy in the shops. A little to pricey for normal everyday geeks like my self to afford right at this moment but i can see a huge potential for large scale implementation by companies such as banks, building societies an other large organizations that have large databases the require speed over cost.
When you consider this is a relitivly new form of data storage you can see why it costs so much can any one reamber how much a USB flash drive was when it first come out? or the hard disk for that matter.
What would one of these babies do to your pagefile, your temporary internet files and your temporary files location. I now use a fast 40gig IDE drive in some of the servers that I maintain, just for these functions. There are many temporary functions in a server that could use just one of these devices. But do very many servers have a PCIe slot. In addition Fusion-io’s PDF fact sheet reflects that they can only run under Linux, XP and Vista, NOT Windows Server 2K3. I readily see that they could be installed in some very good workstation class machines or gaming machines that have multiple PCI-Express X4 slots.
And its gonna be silent.
Okay, to all you idiots talking about how expensive that is, it’s being marketed at this point to companies for servers, not consumers. Obviously no one is going to pay that much for one component of their computer when you could get an entire computer for 1/10th the cost. The price will go down in a few years then it’ll be available on the consumer market, but as of now IT IS NOT.
I only read through post #12 but I can tell you that TOP end gamers will pay for the 80 gig. That will be enough for several games. If you have ever waited for a map to load from your own drive before you could join a server or to “cross the zone line” then you know that faster is better. So, yes, most of us will not get them, we do not have the money, but the few who do will be the envy of all the rest of us.
good idea!
If the girl in the picture looks good, then it must be good; that’s the law.
if the government DOES buy a ton of these, the price is going to drop dramatically =D
I think it’s too expensive for Home user. But big Database developer company may like to have it for their programmer as it reduce their wait time. And their salary is dame high.
The technology is way beyond what it available at this time, it would require different type thinking on behalf of the hard drive manufacturers to come close to what they can offer, the cost will come down but I doubt it would be any time soon, as long as we are stuck with current bus infrastructure it would not make a dent if we double the speed every year.
Interesting product. Can’t say it’s a useless product. Some of you people have no clue and are thinking from a consumer’s point of view. 800MB/sec read and 600MB/sec write is insanely fast and there’re several areas where such high speeds will be invaluable, especially for search in aeronautics. It’s about time where the storage media is on par with increasing processor speeds. We’re heading in the right direction.
Does the pretty model in the background actually increase sales or even make you feel like getting one?….I’m just wondering….cause with all the money they make from the sales, they can even put her naked in pic,post it up on forkids.com, get sued and still have enough money to do it again.
every 9 months the price per gb will drop 50% so summer 2010 75% of all storage will be ssd
Hey Guy we are talking aber 640 GB “speed” of RAM
these suckers are made for large SQL Server for example , and you will be able to store the index in “RAM” as a whole. So that the serve will be a lot faster
Speed, access is here the keyword.
640 GB of Space you can have for less , but access speed and fast i/o that is made for SQL Server, Web Pages
BUT have anyone seen a “LIVE” Product jet I`m willing to test the Product for 3000$ but cant find anyone who can deliver it ? Someone know when the product will be hitting the street or where to order it ?
Regards
lol it be really expensive.
It’s basicaly RAM.. imagine what a server with 600 GBs of RAM can do.. (instead of the huge arrays they have right now, they will just need 1 of those to a huge server
Check out the SUN ZFS file system, L2ARC. They cache the SAN or RAID in fast memory. What a perfect place for 640Gb of SSD and on a single PCIe card at that.
just take 3 ssd of intel in array raid 0
and oleey u have 200giga or 400giga with 600mb write and read
seriously guys. get a grip, this is enterprise performance storage at a fraction the cost… the one for you gaming gimps will be out soon and you will love it!!!! This technology has out performed $500K fibre SAN set ups with half the processing power….. if you actually knew your arse from your elbow and understood proper power computing, you would appreciate that running simulations and models in minutes instead of hours and processing thousands of transactions a minute cost a lot to do…… get over it….. when I was at Uni, 8 years ago and my mate paid £125.00 for a 64MB usb stick I thought he was mad….. but this is more than you pay for a 64GB one now….
most comments are from stupid, ignorant nerds who have a pc to play videogames. This is a MAJOR leap in server usage and video editing. Any professional will jump on buing at least 2 of these babies in a new york minute. this device is made for SPEED, not for capacity. Your arguments are equally stupid as saying that a Formula 1 car is a piece of crap, because you cant go to work with it. OF COURSE! It is made for the track!!! Different markets have different needs, and pro people are willing to pay a premium to get that performance. Get a life. This is an excellent product for mission critical applications, heavy databases, on-air video editing, and a whole bunch of speed-sensitive apps. I was there when a 10 MEGABYTE MFM harddrive that now sits in museums cost $10K so learn some history before posting. New technology is always expensive to cover development costs. This is not for home computing. How many of you have RAID with Infiniband for your lousy laptop? So get your act together and stop embarrasing yourselves
I am a developer and I think that $2400 for an 80GB hard disk is outrageously expensive, but I would buy it right now if I could!
As it is, instead of updating my machine as planned, I am going to save a little more and purchase one of these instead. It makes my current IRAM drives look pathetic!
I would love a 40GB version for windwos/applications, 80GB is just WAY out of my budget
Its hilarious reading these comments. Do you people complaining about price really believe this are marketed towards the home PC market? This isn’t made from someone whose idea of a server is their home computer running apache. lol. Trust me, as much as you like your “box” it is not a business level server.
For all you cheap people out there…
You probably wont need to spend 19k for the full 640gb.
Here is one possible cheap solution:
You could set up say a server with the TB(terrabyte) hard drives and 1 $300 10gb ioDrive (assuming that your Database is no bigger than this).
You can then set up your ioDrive to act as the client API hardrive, that mirrors the database that is on the repository TB drives. While clients flood the crap out of your server (or try to) they are only interacting with the font line iodrive, while at the same time it mirrors the updates to the DB on the TB drives in the background.
Just an idea from the top of my head, but I’m sure there are more clever solutions.
If you like to get a device with comparable performance, the only way is to buy a SAN with Fibre Channel or something like that. For that you pay about 70 or 80$ a Gigabyte. And what about the amount of Rackspace, Energy and cooling for a high end SAN. Compared to this the fusion-io is the smaller invest. The end user market has TB devices for small money, but we’re at the point, where we have more hdd space as anybody can use for his private photos
If this technology reaches the consumer market, the traditional hdd will be history.
Sorry for my crappy english
Phenomenal performance per dollar. This is very affordable for small businesses. I may get one for the DB server at work.