Fusion-io Unviels PCI-e SSD for Gamers
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.

So is professional football.
And baseball.
And golf...
But most of all, you are.
"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
So is professional football.
And baseball.
And golf...
But most of all, you are.
"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
You're just pissed because you hate your job. If I could make sick money playing video games/tournaments, traveling around the world, and endorsing products...um...yeah. Sign me up.
The Fusion-io ioxtreme is being released on a PCI-e x4 card (like pictured), not a x1 card like the article states. Would be hard to break the current SATA speeds on a x1 pci-e lane :-)
The good thing is there's so many new SSD's coming out from all different manufactures,competition "should" bring the cost down fairly fast.
I would love that for raw file editing though.
What, $900 is a new mark of affordability?
Maybe we should all hunker down $1000 for a Intel XE shall we?