Los Angeles (CA) – 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.

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.

More details to come ...

You forgot one 20x more/ maybe in 2 years the price will be down.

Oct 03, 2008 13:33     

You forgot 20x the pirce of the typical tend. I can't justify a peice of hardware costing that much for slight benifits in loading screens which are not every long as they are now with typical HDD in raid -0. Go ahead and make the argument that they are more efficent. compair cost to the end user. 80gb HDD vs 80gb SDD. lets say our 80HDD uses 20watts! and to run it 24/7 for 3 years. that will cost ruffly $36 @ $.07/KWH to run the hard drive for 3 years! why spend $600 for a device that will maybe save you $10 a year at best and will take 50 years to break even in power cost to run. Don't get me wrong I love the speed advantage its just not reasonable yet.

sonyman87 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

@ sonyman87

Oct 03, 2008 14:05     

On the bright side, remember that every mainstream part of today was once a top extreme ultra-costly part yesterday. Just think GeForce 8800 Ultra (nearly mainstream today) or the Athlon X2 6000 (soo cheap). Can't wait for the future! :D
salgado18 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +7

If your livelihood depends on speed...

Oct 03, 2008 14:36     

Then you'd pay for it. The everyday consumer might not be able to justify it, but to anyone who spends a great deal of time with large files and loads of HD accesses, a 20x speed improvement could mean a 10x improvement in income/productivity. This drive just happens to be beneficial to gamers who want to load their maps the fastest... :)
TJ report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +10

Get Rid of SATA

Oct 03, 2008 20:42     

Good, it gets rid of the major bottleneck for SSD. The SATA interface. I wonder how much of the protocol inside SATA are not suited for SSD.
Ed report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

Lil mistake...

Oct 04, 2008 10:19     

"Latency is increased by a factor of between 10-100" Shouldn't that be "reduced by"??!
Krim report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

hope the other componys that make ssd will use pci-e interface too

Oct 04, 2008 14:11     

and save us $$
df report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

perfect...

Oct 05, 2008 02:14     

hello from TURKEY this nevs is perfect.....but according to me,these disks of Fusion IO are very expensive.$595...Very truly yours from Turkey
genco report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

SATA Already at Spec 3.0 - 600 MB/s

Oct 05, 2008 05:59     

The SATA International Organization has already created a new specification which allows a sustained throughput of 600 MBytes/sec, SATA 3.0: http://tinyurl.com/serial-ATA-3-0 SATA 3.0 will be compatible with SATA 2.0 connectors although some changes will be made to "host connectors." Whatever that means. SATA 3.0 will be available at the end of 2008. The new SATA 3.0 specification was created specifically for SSD's. It is not necessary to purchase an extra expensive PCIe card for an SSD. All you need to do is wait for the SATA 3.0 specs to arrive. I know everyone here has a thousand dollars burning in their pockets, especially after the $850 Billion Wall Street Bailout, but just STOP and wait. BAHAHAHAHAHA!!! BTW, the SATA Int. Org. wants you to call the new spec. "SATA 6Gb/s" and not SATA 3.0. I don't know why; they're probably stubborn. You just know everyone's going to call the new spec SATA 3.0. B^D

Cypherdude report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

@Cypherdude

Oct 05, 2008 10:25     

That is great, thought when will we really see that out there? And btw, you may not have noticed what "Ed" said, SATA has something which is a Native Command Queue (basically swaps read/write commands around, to make for faster HDD usage) and as far as I know this is just overhead (not sure if huge or little) for SSDs. It would be great if they made it disappear or optional or something, because it certainly does no good on SSDs, although it might not make much harm either.. So SATA is not.. perfect for SSD...

Q report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

RE: Native Command Queue (NCQ)

Oct 05, 2008 16:46     

A few hardware review websites have done tests comparing NCQ and none NCQ-enabled drives and discovered there is very little difference, if any, with performance. In fact, in a few tests the none NCQ drive outperformed the NCQ drive. NCQ appears to be no more than a lot of marketing hype. Perhaps things have changed now, but I doubt it. Feel free to check for yourself. I believe it is possible for the SSD makers to disable the NCQ feature for their SATA interface drive. I'm sure they have already disabled NCQ for SATA SSD's. BTW, for me, the whole SSD issue is moot. 1 TB, 7200 RPM, SATA 2.0 HDD's continue to drop in price. You can now buy retail-boxed Seagates for $140 and WD "Green" HDD's for $130. These are such incredible deals, I can't see anyone but the most speed crazy users buying 80 GB SSD's for $600. If the economy manages to stabilize, and I hope it does, I suspect you'll be able to buy retail-boxed 1 TB HDD's for $100 in a few months.

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