A little late on this one, but we wanted to spill the beans anyway.
Fusion-io, the purveyor of all things SSD on PCI-e, announced last week that it has a gamer/enthusiast version of its ioDrive. Essentially, a stripped down version of the faster ioDrive, the new ioXtreme is an 80 GB PCI-e SSD card that will be priced at less than $900. The drive will plug into a PCI-e x1 slot and offer speeds that break through current SATA standards--even the new and not yet available SATA 6 Gbps.
Unfortunately, one major feature holds back the ioXtreme from true greatness: boot.
Fusion-io said that while the new ioXtreme isn't bootable, the company will release a firmware update at a later date to enable booting and other features. We recommend early-adopters to hold out until Fusion-io does update the ioXtreme to be bootable, since this is a cried-for feature of many PCI-e SSD solutions.
Performance wise, Fusion-io said that the ioXtreme 80 GB will deliver an "average" read speed of 520 MB/sec. Fusion-io compares its ioXtreme to Intel's X25-E SSD (the fastest SSD currently available) to a tune of 246 MB/sec.
Just for comparison's sake, the Super Talent RAIDdrive GS does 1.5 GB/sec. read and 1.3 GB/sec. writes, sustained.
We forgot to mention that Fatal1ty officially has his name stamped onto Fusion-io's ioXtreme. According to the company's press release:
Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, the world’s best known PC gamer, and Fusion-io join up at the Fatal1ty E3 booth to launch the ioXtreme, a solid state storage device for high-performance PCs and workstations using 64 bit operating systems. The ioXtreme eliminates application latency, delivering the kind of storage performance once limited to the world’s fastest supercomputers.
